Sometimes I wanted them to spot me. When I imagined that summer from their perspective, it went like this. They’d catch the notch of my elbow as I spun out of sight and think they imagined it. Moonlight might betray a strand of blonde hair snagged on the gate’s rusted lock. A single droplet of sweat would slalom the slopes of their vertebrae. They’d shiver and glance back at the greenhouse only to see nothing but stillness. I wanted them to suffer the uneasy sense of someone watching them, of an animal stalking them. I wanted to be the haunting that made them doubt their disbelief of ghosts, the spectre in their nightmares, the reason they looked over their shoulder during the dark hours. I could be that, I could have that influence on someone’s life from a deific distance, and the thought made me giddy.

*

The Blythe-Hamptons moved into my childhood home before I even knew it was up for sale.

“We don’t need such a large house anymore,” my mother trilled at afternoon tea at the Savoy. She neglected to mention her divorce from my father. Haloed under an arched window, a pianist migrated through a droning Debussy arrangement. A teenage waiter smuggled a breath behind a pillar, itched the red skin under his cuffs.

“It’s time for a younger family to grow up there, don’t you think? Make some memories. You kids formed some wonderful memories there.”

I straightened the knife on my plate, its teeth clogged with remnants of clotted cream and scone crumbs. A vein pulsed in my temple. I knew I should take it as good news—I’d never have to enter that house again. But they’d withheld my chance to say goodbye to the greenhouse that had always soothed my temper. The waiter disappeared through swinging doors which echoed his push back and forth, back and forth, before settling.

“What if I ever need a place to stay?” I asked. Mother scooped apricot jam from a miniature jar with her cerulean acrylic pinkie, and sucked it between her over-lined lips.

“Darling there’s always enough money to buy you your own place when you want one. But you’re young—enjoy the glam city life for now, in Sebastian’s nice penthouse.” She cupped my cheek. I didn’t correct her. My high-maintenance, high-society mother would faint at the notion of couch-surfing. She’d never know the thrill of taking advantage of a person, of seeing how deeply you could damage them before they kicked you out. When she’d graduated, she’d simply found a wealthy man and propelled herself into a life of comfortable boredom.

“Do you think he’ll pop the question soon?” Her mauve lips pleaded a smile. “His lawyer’s wage would be wonderful for my future grandchildren.”

I forced a returning smile. Tapped the crags of my chewed nails dully on a saucer off-beat with the piano.

A blur followed, a pulsing of impulses pushing me forward: isolating the greenhouse padlock key from my bag of copies, a successive trio of bus windows jolting my skull like babies with rattles, the familiar twist of sycamore-lined avenues. How my breath caught when I stepped into the humid bloat of the greenhouse. It wasn’t the vibrant sanctuary I remembered. Everywhere leaves and stems were brown and shrivelled, petals wilting or dropped like dresses lazily shed on bedroom floors after a night out. Several clay pots were split, begonia roots hanging like the wrongly accused, swaying slightly, trailing cobwebs to the ceiling. Soil crumbed the tile grout like it had been thrown by the ignored geraniums and caladiums. I picked up a rusty watering can, dead leaves gummed around the base and shook it to find it empty. Aphids swarmed the plants, a line of ants trenched through the grooves in the oak benches, and I moved a pot to force a diversion. My throat bubbled with a cough that morphed into a long, cacophonic laugh. The greenhouse was sickly with desperation, and it justified my being here.

I’d spent a lot of time with my father in here, before I’d gotten old enough to see his entanglement of lies and bad choices, before I was bitter about how much I’d inherited from him. To this day, my breaths had more life in humidity, among the drowsy sighs of leafy companions. I paced between the benches, kissing my fingertips to all the exhausted stems, recalling their names. The star orchid was dead, the rotten remains of white flowers crumpled around the pot like tissues around a sickbed. “They’re stars just like you,” my father used to say, pinching my nose. My favourite loomed in the corner, healthy as ever: the yellow pitcher plant, tall champagne flute shaped flowers which trapped bugs and even mice and ate them alive. 

The windows were mucid with a culture of green algae. I wiped a square panel with my sleeve to expose the villa beyond a koi pond with a small waterfall and a path lined with rose shrubs. Its imposing grandeur made me flinch, the Victorian red brickwork that swamped out over the veranda, those tall ceilings that used to suffocate me. A shadow flitted around my old bedroom. The entire southern downstairs was lined with floor-to-ceiling glass doors. The bones of the house were the same: the black marble kitchen counters, the sweeping curve of the mahogany staircase. In the living room a chubby boy of around eight was flopped across a white leather sofa, his cheek pressed into his fist as he stared at the TV. He snatched up the remote when his sister, a skinny wisp with tightly folded arms, entered the room. She sat on the floor in front of him. A wall away, their mother danced around the kitchen, sliding and twirling between each plate she scrubbed, soap bubbles fizzing on her rubber gloves. I crouched and watched as her husband shoved through the kitchen door and she blushed and returned to the sink, body square and joints mechanical. I cackled because it made me surge with power, bearing witness to her embarrassment.

Muggy determination settled into my pores. I would stay only a few hours, just to rescue some of the plants. As the garden snuck into the night and dragged the greenhouse behind it, I found it hard to look away from the sickly light pouring from the house, confectionary smiles on all their faces. The Blythe-Hampton parents watched TV, the children did homework, towels were neatly folded, a bottle of chardonnay uncorked, the boy practiced a french horn and the girl a clarinet and I laughed at the forced encouraging smiles from their parents. Still, I couldn’t help but watch these mundane lives that had replaced mine, because I hoped for hints of thrilling secrets that helped them cope with normality. The gluey scum on the greenhouse windows layered my view with a retro filter, each little square like a polaroid print-out. The parents left the windows open when they went to bed and fucked with a business-like primness. The mother’s pale wrist hung statuesque over the edge of the mattress. I remembered her dancing earlier, the plumpness of her cheeks when she smiled, and I superimposed the ghost of that image above this scene in contrast, framed by the long white curtains writhing like silkworms.

Once they were all asleep, I shook their spell out of my ears and focussed again on the greenhouse. It was only glass from about the waist up while the bottom was brick, so I could duck out of sight if I needed to, lay to sleep unseen. Just one night, I swore. To help the plants survive this transition period until the family got settled and prioritised the greenhouse. I laid out those most in need of help on the middle bench, a triage of shrivelled petals, lethargic stalks, and aphid-ripped leaves. In the back corner I patchworked a morgue of lost causes. Later, I lay on the tiled floor and let the chill grip my spine. The notion of leaving in the morning unsettled me. I gathered lungfuls of soil-saturated air and closed my eyes, imagining earth and petals floating around the dark cavities of my lungs, like embers around a bonfire. I slept easy on the dirt-strewn floor at the centre of a congregation of spiders and woodlice welcoming me home. 

*

My quick goodbye stretched days, then weeks. I brought a sleeping bag, snacks, and a bottle of whiskey. I downloaded an app that could identify plant species from a photo and offer care advice. I wanted to nurse the plants back to health while the Blythe-Hamptons withered in that villa. It was a wonder none of them spotted the watering can jumping from bench to bench, the flowers blooming, the saplings I propagated. They never once stood at those huge french doors and saw the greenhouse and thought, look at all those ripe tomatoes, I’d love to burst one between my teeth like bubblegum and lick the seeds from my lips. 

I knew I shouldn’t be there, but the small guilt I felt was washed-out and hazy. I knew the Blythe-Hamptons were no better than me, I just wanted to see the evidence. As soon as they hired a nanny, I saw who the father truly was. His wife was out at her book club, the kids in bed, and his hand slid up her skirt as she slowly unbuttoned his shirt. I laughed because it was so predictable, but kept watching, my chest hitching musty breaths. He bent her over the back of the sofa, and I squeezed my thighs when he squeezed hers. If they were as similar to my family as they seemed, I couldn’t feel sorry for the mother. “Book club” was obviously her cover for cheating too. If I were the nanny, I’d pull the threads of mistrust, giggle in front of the mother, and when she asked what was funny, I’d tell her “Oh, your husband cracks me up.”

Their covert little routine helped me keep track of the days. Every Tuesday, the mother attempted to contour her face, wrenching cleanser-soaked pads over her cheekbones after each mistake, her bare skin redder each time. Her husband would watch her Lexus snake the long driveway, the nanny waiting in the shadows for his nod. I’d suck on my fingers and shot capfuls of whiskey, tipping my head to the cobwebbed ceiling then back to them. Amidst the tempest of their lies, my vines would burrow under all of their skins. I’d be a part of their family, a diseased and swollen growth that would fester the stem if it wasn’t cut away.

The rooms I couldn’t see infuriated but intrigued me, sectioning the Blythe-Hamptons lives into comic-book panels. The siblings would play together in one room then scream at each other next door. I stuffed the gaps with tinder in my mind and visualised the house sucking the goodness out of them. The plants beyond saving decomposed farther. Ossified bark from rotting bonsais flaked to the tiles like scratched-off scabs. Their decay strengthened the power I felt at my triumphs: the sunrise reddening of the first tomato, when sage grew from a cutting, when I learned the little girl’s name. “She’s called Martha,” I crooned to the tomato plants. My syllables stepped along the vines with my fingertips. She was climbing the grand goat willow tree that bulged the fence corner and threatened to expand the already massive garden. Its furry catkins purred and scratched at the greenhouse roof. Her mother called her in for dinner, hollow arms expectant, and then I knew her name. Before she reached her mother’s embrace, her father scooped them both into a big bear hug, and the son abandoned his textbook on the coffee table and sprinted to wrap an arm around each of his parents’ legs, and they all laughed and smiled, and sat down to eat. The nanny, with a pot in hand ready to serve, smiled too, in the same grudging way ours used to. Only my smile could possibly be genuine.

I left the greenhouse every couple of days. Of my collection of copied keys, my ex Jonah lived the closest. I’d log into his emails to check his work rota and visit his flat while he served craft beers on the other side of town. I’d soak off the greenhouse grime in his jacuzzi bath, charge my phone, swig samples of his vast single malt whiskey collection, then sleep on his bed, breathing in the familiar lemongrass laundry powder. I wondered if he knew, if he spotted towels in his laundry basket he didn’t remember using. Maybe he had a new girlfriend, maybe I’d find her in his bed one day. I imagined her terror at waking to find me hovering in the doorway. She’d know who I was. She’d have stalked me on every social media she could find me on, scrolled through years of my changing hairstyles and cities and friends. He’d have told her all his worst stories about me, branding me psycho and bitch. I’d buy a new outfit and fling my dirty one in overflowing bus stop bins. I’d eat alone in restaurants and flirt with waiters. On my way home, I’d swing by the big Homebase and pick up chrysanthemum or chilli pepper seeds, pots, trays, soil, spray bottles. I’d slip back into my greenhouse, set it all out, and check on the Blythe-Hamptons.

I noticed the weather more than I ever had before. When rainfall cocooned the greenhouse, I could barely see the family through the flood of distortion. It was almost freeing, their existence compressed to a constellation of lights, little winkings of morse code somersaulting toward me through water and glass. I’d play soft rock music on my phone to complement the bass of the rain, dance with the watering can, tend each of my little plants, swigging whiskey from the bottle until the blur of the windows matched what my eyes wanted to see. 

When the sun shone brightest, the mother would starfish bikini-clad on a tartan blanket and skim stacks of self-help books as if hoping to cure the state of her life. The glass panels crackled in the heat, my bones mimicked them. The days they ate outside, I’d crack a window open to listen, becoming more lax in my actions over time. On the longest summer day, the parents shared a strained conversation and a bottle of cabernet on the veranda. Wasps vibrated around the flowers I’d pushed into my messy bun, palpitating in the electric zing of the sun. I swatted one away from my ear just in time to hear the mother suggest replacing the nanny due to her “incompetence”. I pressed my face to the glass to relish the tension in her husband’s jaw, the spasm of his cheek. The argument rolled indoors, but a week later a new nanny appeared.

Martha learned to climb the goat willow higher and faster. Her brother, lured from his Xbox by the hottest summer days, kicked the trunk over and over until I wanted to kick him.

“Slow poke,” he taunted once she joined him on the ground.

“Race you then,” she smirked, grabbing a low branch.

The catkins shuddered against the greenhouse roof. The air was molten with a deep, earthy scent which clung to my pores and settled with the sticky sweat on my forehead. I laid on my back and watched the siblings scramble skyward. A huge spider crawled by me and I scooped it into my palm. I twisted my hands in the air above my face as it crawled over them, swirling them like a fortune teller caressing a crystal ball, morphing my digits into an obstacle course to relieve the spider’s boredom. Martha sped off in front of her brother, flung down jeers and even paused to let him catch up. Just as he reached the same branch as her, she launched upwards. With a frustrated grunt he reached under her sundress and pulled down her underpants. They snagged on a branch at her ankles, the yellow and blue fish from The Little Mermaid grinning dumbly. Martha squealed and kicked his head. He dropped from the tree, crumpled on the soil. I flicked the spider to the ground and it scuttered away. The brother lay whimpering, and Martha descended with wide eyes and trembling limbs. She jumped from a low branch, steadied herself with a palm to the dirt, and her brother scooped himself off the ground, cradling his left arm. The kids straightened and stared at each other, surrounded by the tree’s discarded catkins. I plucked a swollen tomato from the vine and ate it like popcorn. It was the only one ripe enough today, but the moment was too good not to treat it with the drama it deserved, so I ate the green ones too, as fear and hatred bloomed in each of their eyes, tiny seeds I knew this house would cultivate. 

“If you say what I did, I’ll tell them what you did,” she said eventually. After that, with the boy’s cast reminding them what had occurred, the TV remote scuffles ended. They no longer snuck up to tickle each other. They vastly ignored each other, oceanic silences islanded with careful, hurtful words. Their parents, caught in their concealed longings for other people, didn’t seem to notice, but I did. I revelled in the grime that textured all of the Blythe-Hampton interactions. The four of them had broken so quickly, so beautifully, and I saw my phantom presence in their lives as the catalyst for it all.

The greenhouse was mine. It was me, after all, who’d tempted the tomatoes into making fruit again. Me, who’d sprayed the chrysanthemums with a tonic to combat the aphids, me who’d watered each plant, nurtured bulbs and seeds, pruned infected stems, sweltered in incubated mugginess. It made me feel real in a way nothing else ever had. Sweating in the greenhouse heat, my mind kept circling back to my inevitable discovery, to losing the greenhouse. I fought these thoughts with fantasies of alternate scenarios: the Blythe-Hamptons being terrified away by me, vines and weeds invading the ruined house, walls cracking, a young tree piercing the roof and smashing the tiles like a fish on a hook, it’s flailing remains finally falling limp. 

*

By the summer’s end, the outside world had faded to sepia. The only real people were me and the Blythe-Hamptons. I knew them more deeply than I’d ever cared to know anybody. I’d dissected them, tweezered the layers back to expose their trembling organs, so feeble, so human. Late one night, the mother walked past the French doors, froze, turned, and stared right at me. Electricity carved sizzling lines up and down my body. This was it. I posed by the pitcher plant. A fly crawled up the outside of one of its flutes, drawn by the sweet nectar scent or the alluring criss-cross of pink lines veining yellow. Mrs. Blythe-Hampton straightened herself square to the window. I arched my eyebrows, bared my teeth. I thought she’d run straight out to scream at me. I could tell her everything her family never would. If she was going to make me leave, I’d fill my final moments with venom. Or, somehow, I’d try to stay. I stared back at her, hating myself for not planning for this moment. Here in the greenhouse, I’d finally broken through the foggy haziness of my unwanted adulthood, but she could take it all away. She stood for several seconds, perfectly still, staring. Her eyebrows narrowed, and her thin lips twisted in a snarl. She loathed me. The fly hesitated on the lip of the pitcher plant, its huge pair of eyes vibrating. But there was only one way to go, deep into the cavern. Everything was designed to let it in but not out, the downward facing hairs, the slippery oils on the inner surface. Mrs. Blythe-Hampton’s body jerked and she screamed at me, brought her nails to her hair and ripped out clumps. I leaned closer to the window and sucked my bottom lip between my teeth, bit down. Why didn’t she come and confront me? My fingers shook, the ragged edges of my bitten nails gnawing into my palms. I feared returning to a life where I had no purpose, no power. But if this was my last powerful moment, it was a beautiful one, knowing I could cause such fear and stress. I couldn’t choose between watching the fly or the woman. As the fly’s buzzing intensified I imagined sickly rips as clots of the mother’s hair dropped between her fingers, singed by her falling tears. Her arms shook violently, and she kept her gaze fixed upon me as she decimated her scalp and screamed with such raw energy that I could see her throat, and the windows shuddered. My lip spasmed but I held it trapped between my canines. They finally pierced through, and a drop of blood ran into my mouth, another crested my chin. The fly dropped. Erratic buzzing tunnelled the plant’s neck, I peered inside. The digestive juices would already be attacking, dissolving its wings, burning its eyes as it writhed. 

Mrs. Blythe-Hampton stopped and slumped to the hardwood floor. She sat cross-legged and expressionless, her hyperventilating breaths fogging the window she still stared into, though at that height her gaze no longer landed on me.  She had never been looking at me, I realised. It was dark outside, and no light came from the greenhouse. What she was staring at with such fierce loathing was her own reflection in the expensive French patio doors. I released my lip and curved it into a bloody smile while the fly’s buzzing smothered.