Losing You Page 7

  She looked at me for a second. Everything that was important in our relationship with each other was unsaid, lying deep and cold under the surface politeness. We both knew this, both knew that the other knew. I had had an affair – no, a brief fling – with Joel, although at the time they weren’t living together and I wasn’t sure if that counted as betrayal or not. We’d never mentioned it, nor would we, although it was in every glance we exchanged, every word we spoke. And then, as if in a weird act of revenge, exacted without the main players even being aware of it, her daughter had bullied and tormented my daughter until Charlie had dreaded setting foot in school. Alix was certainly aware of that. I knew that Rick had called her into school and talked to her about it, but I never discovered how she had responded, whether she’d been self-righteous, defensive, appalled, disbelieving, secretly pleased. We’d never mentioned that, either, and we probably never would.

  In another life, I thought, as I stood inside the front door, we could have been friends. She was dry and strong-willed and I could imagine liking her. But all I could think now was that her daughter had made mine suffer and now my daughter had disappeared. We were never going to be friends and I didn’t feel like pretending that we were.

  ‘You’ve already talked to Tam,’ Alix said. ‘On the phone.’

  ‘I need to talk to her properly, in person.’

  Still Alix didn’t move. ‘I think she’s having a shower. Jenna’s still here as well.’

  ‘I can talk to them both,’ I said. ‘Can you call them down, or shall I go up?’

  ‘I’ll call them.’ She went up the stairs and I heard her rapping at a door, then the muffled rise and fall of voices.

  ‘They’re on their way,’ she said, walking down the stairs. ‘You’d better come into the kitchen. Coffee? Tea?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  She led me through and gestured to a chair. The stainless-steel surfaces gleamed above the stone tiles. All the domestic appliances – the espresso machine, the food-processor, the bread-maker, the toaster, the juicer – stood in a line. The smell of toast hung in the air. There was a Christmas cactus on the table, next to a large bowl of satsumas. I could see it was a lovely room but now it felt implacable and coldly efficient. Alix sat opposite me: clearly, she had no intention of leaving me alone with Tam and Jenna.

  Bullies come in all shapes and sizes. Tam was at least a head shorter than me, with a tiny face, large eyes and mouth, a cascade of dark blonde hair. She came into the kitchen all washed and brushed, curled and pampered. She wore a brightly coloured smock-top, gathered with a ribbon over her surprisingly large breasts, and blue jeans. Everything about her glowed. I felt a stab of fury and had to take a deep, calming breath. Behind Tam, her friend Jenna was large, clumsy and anxious.

  ‘Mum said you wanted to talk to us.’

  ‘That’s right. Charlie’s disappeared.’ I watched an expression I couldn’t read flicker across her face as I made myself say: ‘It looks like she’s run away.’

  Jenna gave a little gasp.

  ‘Run away? Charlie?’ Tam frowned.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I know what happened between you and Charlie last term. I’m not interested in any of that. Right now, I don’t care who did what to whom. I want to find out where she’s gone and I want you to tell me anything that might help. She was here last night, you were the last people I know saw her. What happened?’

  ‘What d’you mean, what happened?’

  ‘Was she all right? Did you all get on? Was there a falling-out, a quarrel? Did she say anything that seems odd to you now?’

  ‘No,’ said Tam.

  ‘That’s all you’ve got to say – no?’

  ‘She was all right,’ Tam said, with stubborn sulkiness. ‘There wasn’t a quarrel, she didn’t say anything odd.’

  ‘Tam, I don’t care if there was. I just want to know about it. I need a clue.’

  ‘I think Tam is saying she doesn’t have a clue to give you,’ said Alix. ‘Is that right, Tam?’

  ‘Right. Nothing happened.’

  ‘She was excited about going on holiday,’ said Jenna. She was pulling strands of her long brown hair over her face and looked embarrassed.

  ‘Did she seem troubled?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Talked, watched a movie, ate pizza… you know.’

  ‘And Charlie did all that too?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did she phone anyone in the evening, send a text, anything like that?’

  ‘Probably. I didn’t notice. I wasn’t watching her the whole time, you know.’

  ‘Tam!’ said her mother, sharply.

  ‘What is all this? I wasn’t particularly keen on inviting her in the first place.’

  ‘So Charlie joined in with everything, seemed fine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘We just talked. Stuff, you know. Nothing, really.’

  ‘What time did you all go to sleep?’

  ‘About one,’ said Tam, at the same time as Jenna said, with a furtive giggle and a sliding glance through her veil of hair, ‘We didn’t really sleep much.’

  ‘So you didn’t really sleep much and she set off around nine to do the paper round. Was she exhausted?’

  ‘She seemed all right,’ said Tam.

  I stared at her stubborn, pretty little face, her big blue eyes. ‘You do realize that I’m not asking you these questions for the fun of it?’

  ‘I hope you find her,’ said Tam, looking away. ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up. Have you asked Ashleigh?’

  ‘Of course I’ve asked Ashleigh. I’ve asked the newsagent, I’ve asked her father, I’ve abandoned the holiday and I’ve called the police.’

  ‘The police?’ Jenna’s voice was high with distress.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will they come and see us?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Why?’ I looked at her closely. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘I think that’s enough,’ said Alix, stonily. ‘I know you’re distressed, Nina, but –’

  ‘I’m not distressed, I am scared about Charlie.’

  ‘Nevertheless it doesn’t give you the right –’

  ‘Yes, it does. Your daughter made my daughter’s life a misery for months. Last night Charlie was here and now she’s run away. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection. Something happened.’

  ‘Tam says it didn’t.’

  ‘It didn’t,’ repeated Tam, in a high, indignant voice.

  ‘I don’t believe her. I want to know what they did to Charlie last night.’

  ‘That’s enough. I think you’d better leave now.’

  ‘Was Suzie at the sleepover as well?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Just wondering. She lives in that pink house near the church, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve here,’ said Alix, frostily. ‘I understand you’re concerned, but if you think you’ll do any good by making wild accusations, you’re quite mistaken. The girls have told you everything that happened.’

  I stood up.

  ‘I’m not concerned, I’m scared. And I’ll do whatever I can to find Charlie. Listen, if you two think of anything – anything – you have to get in touch.’ I saw a Post-it pad and pen lying near the phone. I scribbled down my mobile and landline numbers. ‘There. Just call me.’

  They nodded mutely.

  ‘I can see myself out,’ I said to Alix, as she rose from the table.

  But she followed me to the door and shut it firmly behind me. I was already running down the path, running because I had to do something, although I had no idea what.

  I went to Suzie’s house. Suzie was a languid girl who, on the few occasions I’d met her, scarcely spoke but always wore a half-smile that gave nothing away. Charlie had told me she was powerful at school, precisely because of her inscrutable passivity.

  I k
nocked on the door and Suzie’s mother opened it, wearing an old tracksuit and washing-up gloves. Behind her, there was the sound of a TV at full volume and, over that, children fighting. A scream like a drill cut through the air, then someone weeping steadily.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, then, turning her head, shouted, ‘Shut up, you boys. Sorry. It’s Nina, isn’t it? Charlotte’s mother.’

  And she frowned at me. Like Alix, Suzie’s mother – whose name I couldn’t remember – had been informed that her daughter was part of the group who had bullied Charlie. I’d imagined that one of the mothers might have contacted me to say sorry or to talk over what had happened, but no one ever had.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, but can I have a word with Suzie, please?’

  ‘What do you want her for?’

  ‘Charlie’s disappeared and I wondered if Suzie could help me.’

  Suzie’s mother didn’t step back to let me in, but stayed solidly in the doorway. ‘Why would she know?’ she asked.

  Would I react like this, I thought, if Suzie had gone missing, with an aggrieved sense of my own blamelessness? I hoped not. I hoped I would lay aside all hostility and help in whatever way I could. ‘Is she there?’

  ‘She went out,’ said Suzie’s mother.

  ‘Where?’

  Even as I asked, we both saw Suzie meandering along the road towards us, and by her side an equally stringy and unhasty boy, carrying her bag.

  ‘Suzie,’ I said, as she came towards us. ‘Can I have a quick word? It’s about Charlie.’

  Suzie stared at me as if she couldn’t understand anything I was saying to her. The lanky youth shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  ‘It’s getting cold,’ said her mother. ‘You’d better come into the hall.’

  So the four of us stood wedged together in the narrow hallway, among the wellington boots and coats.

  ‘Charlie’s disappeared,’ I said again. ‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About how she was last night. Whether anything happened to upset her.’

  Suzie shrugged. ‘She was fine.’

  ‘So, nothing at all happened?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’ She slid her ironic smile across to the youth and he smiled back.

  ‘Tam and Jenna said –’

  ‘You’ve been to see them and now you’re here too?’ said the mother. She peeled off her washing-up gloves as if she was preparing for a fight. ‘Why? Did they say something I should know about?’

  ‘Not at all, they couldn’t really help, but –’

  ‘They couldn’t help but you come here making all your old accusations about Suzie. I know there was a falling-out last term, but you can’t go around making out that your daughter’s a victim and mine’s a bully. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘I don’t care what happened last term, I’m just trying to find my daughter.’ I drew a deep breath. ‘She’s run away.’

  ‘Run away? That’s different from going missing, isn’t it?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘If you ask me, you’re trying to shift responsibility for this from where it should be on to my daughter. And we all know where it should be.’

  I turned away from her and tried to meet Suzie’s gaze. ‘Please, Suzie,’ I said. ‘Something happened, didn’t it? I’m not trying to get you into trouble, I just have to find Charlie. Please.’

  For a tiny moment, she looked at me. She half opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘Out,’ said her mother. ‘And don’t come bothering us again, do you hear?’

  Suzie took the boy’s hand and said to him, ‘Let’s go to my room, shall we?’

  The door slammed.

  Sludge lay under the kitchen table covered in the sticky estuary mud, so I knew Renata and Jackson were back, and I called to them as I checked for messages on the answering-machine. There was only one, from Rory, saying, ‘Hello, hello, hello. Nina! Will you pick up?’

  ‘Jackson’s crying in his room,’ said Renata, as she came down the stairs.

  I went to find him. He was sitting on his bed, still in his jacket and boots, which had left muddy tracks across the carpet, and tears were streaked down his flushed cheeks, like snail tracks. He looked thoroughly forlorn and suddenly much younger than eleven. I picked up his cold hands and blew on them to warm them. ‘I’m so sorry about all of this,’ I said.

  I told him about the police coming to the house, about Charlie’s missing things, the washbag and makeup bag, nightshirt and purse, and the inescapable conclusion that she had chosen to run away, although I had no idea why. I put my arm round his tense shoulders, pulled him close to me and said it was rotten for him that we were missing going to Florida, but that we would go, I promised, as soon as everything was sorted. Which I was sure would be very soon. I said that for a while – until Charlie was found – I was going to be busy. I told him I was relying on him to help me.

  I said all these things – I heard my calm, authoritative voice, speaking whole sentences, and saw myself as I stroked his dark hair back from his forehead – but only a tiny part of me was there with my son. My brain was like a well-occupied household, activity taking place simultaneously in each of its many rooms. I was thinking about what I should do next. I was making lists and running through options. I was trying to look back over the past days and weeks to find anything, a single word or an overheard scrap of a conversation, that might lead me in the right direction. I was looking at the digital watch strapped to Jackson’s wrist and trying to work out exactly how many minutes Charlie had been missing. I put my hands on Jackson’s shoulders and thought about Charlie; I looked into Jackson’s eyes and saw Charlie looking back; I talked to Jackson and called out to Charlie – just come home.

  ‘So what shall I do to help?’ he asked, in a wobbly voice.

  ‘Think,’ I said. I kissed his forehead. ‘Think of anything she said to you. Anything you heard her say to anyone else.’ I hesitated for a second. ‘Anything your dad said to her, or she said about him to you, for instance.’

  ‘Dad? Why Dad?’

  ‘No real reason.’

  ‘And that’s all I can do, just think?’

  ‘For now,’ I said. ‘And don’t use the phone in case she’s trying to call.’

  I left him. Downstairs Renata was back at the clearing-up.

  I could hear the chink of glasses, the busy tapping of her feet across the tiles, cupboard doors opening and closing. Sludge gave one short bark, and for a jolt of a second I thought perhaps she was barking because Charlie was there, but then the knowledge that she wasn’t flooded through me and left me shaky and cold. I stood at the top of the stairs, my hand on the banisters, and felt suspended in an eerie sadness. Then I turned sharply and went into Charlie’s bedroom. I sat on her bed and picked up the clothes that were lying there, pressing my face into the soft folds that smelt of her, a smell I’d recognize anywhere, musky and sweet. I closed my eyes and, for a tiny moment, let myself imagine that she was with me, in the room, that when I looked up she’d be standing there, with her lanky-legged slouch, her dishevelled mane of hair, her bold gaze.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said, out loud, and stood up.

  I prowled round the room once more. I sat at her desk and picked up the notebooks: an English drafting exercise book, a red French book, which she’d only just started; the first page was filled with irregular verbs, accompanied by one of Charlie’s doodlings. She doodles on everything. She’ll sit at breakfast and draw spirals over the headlines of the paper and then absentmindedly ink out the teeth of politicians. She’s defaced my address book. She makes little notes and sketches, which I discover when I open a notepad or pick up my shopping list. Her school books are covered in jaunty little designs or bold, cross-hatched words (on the French exercise book it said ‘Lush’ in thick pink felt tip, which had soaked through to the following pages). When she was little, she used to draw stick men and women running along the wallpaper above our bed, or trail
indelible pens along the sofas and armchairs. Lately, she had taken to drawing on herself. Her palms have beautiful symmetrical patterns on them, which soften and spread in the heat. She drew tattoos on her arms and thighs and little cartoon smily faces on her toes.

  I picked up the uneven piles of school papers. There was her GCSE coursework on Great Expectations, an essay in French about the places she liked to go on holiday, which ended, I saw with a wince, on a reference to being about to go to Florida. She’d put that in, I knew, to show off her use of the future tense. Would you have written about going to Florida, if you weren’t planning to go? Stop that, Nina. I looked elsewhere. There was a graph that showed how quickly something dissolved in something else, a rough draft of a piece she’d written about the history of Sandling Island, which was edged with an intricate mosaic in different colours. There was a messy sheet of algebraic workings-out, a piece of paper with several CD titles written on it, a recipe in pencil for stuffed tomatoes (with a drawing of a tomato underneath it). There was a white envelope with her name written on it, and inside a thin piece of paper, which I drew out. ‘Remember what Pete Doherty says…’ Was that from a boy? A girl?

  There was a notebook, which turned out to be full of scraps of messages, presumably passed round during classes. ‘Give me some chewing-gum!’ it said. ‘I’m bored,’ and ‘Can u come tonite?’ Then another spiral-bound notebook, which was empty except for the first couple of pages. There was a sketchily drawn picture of a face, gender unclear, with a sharp nose and a mass of scribbled-in hair, and underneath it, in Charlie’s madcap scrawl: ‘I think he likes me!’

  I flipped over the pages, and this time she had written: ‘I know he likes me.’ And ‘I think I’ll wear my pink skirt.’ Then just a few scrawls, meaningless insignia, as if she had been trying out a new pen, and then, just a line that zigzagged down the page, and her own name, written in elaborate Gothic script.

  I put down the notebook and pulled open Charlie’s drawers, which were crammed full of lined and blank paper, notepads, old homework diaries, playing-cards, postcards, bits of wrapping paper, loose pens and pencils, cartridges for her printer. And then I found an elaborate doodle, which, on closer inspection, seemed to be made out of interlaced letter Js.