Losing You (12 page)

‘She wasn’t so bad,’ said Tam, defensively.

‘What did she say?’

‘You mean, in the morning? Not much. I don’t remember.’

‘She said I was weak and Tam was vicious,’ said Jenna.

‘She said she was sorry for us because we had such manky little lives that spiking someone’s drink was our idea of fun.’ That sounded like my Charlie.

‘And then she left. On her bike?’

‘I think so.’

‘You didn’t offer to help her with the paper round, given the circumstances?’

They didn’t answer.

‘I’ll take that as a no. And you haven’t seen or heard from her since?’

Jenna covered her face with her hands. Her hair streamed down on to the table. She said, in a muffled sob, ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it? We didn’t mean anything to happen, it was only a joke. We would never have done it if we’d known, Ms Landry, you have to believe that –’

‘Shut up,’ said Tam. ‘Just shut up.’

‘I thought you should know immediately,’ said Alix.

‘I’ve got to ring the hospital,’ I said. ‘She might be there.’

‘I’ll do that for you. I know people there. Is there a phone in the living room?’

‘Yes.’

‘You two can go home now,’ said Alix, to Tam and Jenna. ‘Get Joel and tell him what’s happened.’

‘But, Mum –’

‘Tell your father,’ she said. ‘And you, Jenna, you’d better tell your parents as well. If you don’t, I will.’

The girls left, and I saw them walking down the road several yards apart, their feet dragging against the pavement.

I could hear the rise and fall of Alix’s voice from the living room although I couldn’t make out the words, then a pause while she waited. Outside in the garden, Jackson was standing wretchedly by the wall while Sludge was charging around wildly with a stout stick forcing her jaws open into an idiotic, pink-tongued grin. My hands were clenched in my lap. I opened them out and stared at my palms, my ringless fingers, the scar along the left thumb, my life line. Charlie’s hands were whiter and smoother than mine, her fingers long and elegant. She wore a glass thumb ring and round her wrist a thin leather bracelet. I hadn’t told Mahoney that.

‘Nothing,’ said Alix, coming into the room. ‘So that’s good news.’

‘Is it?’ I said. ‘The problem is –
one
of the problems is – that I go over things in my head repeatedly and I’ve stopped being able to tell what’s good and what’s bad and what things mean.’ I halted. It was as if I knew there was something out there in the darkness and I had to feel for it. Yes, that was it. ‘For instance, I’ve looked through Charlie’s room. She seems to have taken her washbag and her nightshirt, the things that were lying on the floor. But then I opened her drawer and there were other possessions – like her antibiotics – that were just as important.’

Alix nodded in recognition. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She was very self-conscious about her impetigo. She asked how quickly the rash would go.’

I looked at her sharply. Alix was so super-discreet about
her work as a GP, about her knowledge of people’s secrets, that it was a shock to hear even so guarded a comment as that. ‘You don’t know something, do you?’ I asked. ‘Did she tell you anything? I mean, that might throw any light on why she would run away?’

Alix’s expression hardened. ‘If I did, I would tell you, or the police.’

I paused. Clearly there was no point in pressing her. ‘But do you see?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it strange?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alix, uneasily. ‘I suppose so. But if you were running away, you wouldn’t be thinking very clearly, would you?’

‘It’s as if…’ I was struggling to make myself clear, when I wasn’t even clear in my own head ‘…as if she could only take the things she could see.’

‘I suppose she was in a hurry,’ Alix said.

‘But to forget her medication. Or take her makeup bag but not the makeup remover. Maybe it means that she sent somebody to get the stuff for her, somebody who didn’t know where everything was.’

‘I’m going to make you something to eat now.’

‘No. I’ve got to go.’

‘Where to?’

‘I’ve got to go,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll let you know if anything…’

It was a sentence I couldn’t complete. Images swirled in my mind and I made myself focus on the tasks ahead. Before I could leave there was Jackson.

‘Renata!’ I called up the stairs.

There was a muffled groan, then silence. I ran up the steps, two at a time, and knocked on my bedroom door.

‘Yes,’ came her faint voice, and I pushed open the door.

She’d closed the curtains and at first I couldn’t see her. Gradually I made out a humped shape in the bed, and shook it gently where I thought her shoulder might be. ‘Renata?’

‘Whassit?’

I pulled the duvet back. She was fully dressed under it, but half sat up. ‘I don’t feel very well,’ she said. I could see she had been crying. Her mascara had run in smudgy streaks down her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, Nina. Maybe I ought to leave. I’m no use to you – I’m just in your way.’

‘You can’t leave,’ I said. ‘You have to stay here and make sure Jackson’s all right. I’m going out to look again. Up you get.’

‘I feel a bit sick.’

‘Here, up. Make yourself some coffee, help yourself to food. Keep an eye on Jackson. Thanks. I’ll call you.’

I didn’t wait for a reply, but ran down the stairs again. Alix followed me out of the house, looking awkward. She began to say something but I got into the car and drove away, with that rattle still there, not knowing where I was going.

For the moment I had done with rationality. Now I had the wild idea of searching randomly. Perhaps I would find her lying injured beside her bike, or spy her walking by a distant shore. I drove along The Street, quickly passing the shops, the bungalows, the bowling-green and the playing-fields and then I was in open farmland – The Street becomes a country road that bisects the island. After a few hundred yards I turned right on to a road that leads directly to the sea. At the end there is a youth camp where children come in the summer to swing from ropes, play football and canoe, get fresh air and get drunk, smoke and steal from local shops.
But now it was deserted. I parked in front of Reception, a green wooden hut. I had thought of asking if anybody had seen Charlie but I didn’t even get out of the car. The car park was empty, the hut door padlocked. A cat lay on the step and peered at me suspiciously. A couple of seagulls stalked round the bins, steadying themselves in the breeze with their huge wings. Was it worth walking along the sea wall? I decided I was better off in the car. I turned round and drove back to the main road, then right, heading for the less populated end of Sandling Island.

On my left I saw a sign for Birche Farm. Jay. Did I need to get back in touch with him in the light of what I had learned? I felt my brain was working slowly when it needed to be quick and nimble. I had thought Charlie had made it up with the girls who had been bullying her but they had spiked her drink and she had vomited. I thought she had planned to run away. Now it seemed as if it had been more of an impulse, and that someone had helped her. Who could that have been? Jay was an obvious candidate, but would he help her and not go with her? Was there someone else she hadn’t told me about?

The road narrowed into a lane and then into a rough parking area. It was hard to believe that in the summer there was often a jam even to get into it but now only two cars were there. Dog-walkers. I stopped, got out and ran across the rough grass that led to the sea wall. In the distance I could make out a small group of people. As I got closer I saw there were three of them, an elderly couple in conversation with a white-haired woman. Two small dogs scampered and yapped at their feet. They turned as I ran up to them, panting with the effort.

‘I’m looking for my daughter,’ I said. ‘Have you seen anybody?’

They shook their heads.

‘We just got here,’ said the man.

‘I’ve walked along the sea wall to the marsh,’ said the white-haired woman. ‘There’s a man picking cockles on the sand. I didn’t see nobody else.’

I ran past them to the edge of the path. The tide was still quite low, shingle, sand and mud. The water between the island and Frattenham on the mainland was just a hundred yards or so wide. I was standing on the point, the easternmost tip of the island, and from it I could see along the path a mile to the north and almost as far in the other direction, to the south-west, until the path disappeared from view round the gentle curve of the sea wall. North, I could only see one figure, the cockle-picker, on the sands. South-west, there was nobody. A small crane stood in the distance, where the sea wall was being repaired, but even that was still and unused at the weekend.

As I turned back towards the car, I passed the three old people again.

‘She’s a fifteen-year-old called Charlotte,’ I said. ‘If you see her, ask her to call home.’

They didn’t speak. If I had chatted with them about the weather, or asked them the ages and names of their dogs, they would have been content and polite. But they were uncomfortable with a strange woman in search of her daughter.

It was impossible to drive north of the road except for a couple of tracks that led directly into the yards of the two main farms on the island. The north of the island that faced
the mainland was much less accessible than the south, arable fields that gradually wettened and dissolved into marshland, reeds and disused oyster beds, then the sea and England. Of course Sandling Island was England as well, but it didn’t feel like that. It had just about clung to the mainland for centuries, but its grip was loosening and I sometimes imagined that one more storm would wash it away.

On the way back, the grey sky started to break up and widening patches of blue appeared. An idea occurred to me, and instead of heading back into the town I turned right on the road that led to the mainland. The island is almost flat, except for a few hillocks, bumps and sandbars, and one prominent reminder of the island’s ancient past, a tumulus beneath which is a large burial site. It must have been chosen because of its vantage-point, the views it gave of potential threats, whether from the North Sea or the two channels running round the island or the mainland. Now it was a grass-covered anomaly in this otherwise flat landscape.

I parked the car and made my way up the slope. It was really nothing more than a large knoll but it gave a view of much of the island and across the sea to the mainland beyond. I could see the town to the far west and then I let my gaze follow the line of the coast, past the caravan park, then a mile of marshland and grass until it reached the causeway, which stood well clear of the water and the mud, now that the tide was still only half-way in. Once, years ago, there had been a path round the whole island but there had been a winter of terrible storms ten years earlier and the sea wall had collapsed under the onslaught. Now, just down from where I stood, there was a treacherous series of creeks and salt marshes, old concrete emplacements, pillboxes, and paths
that led nowhere. As I turned, clockwise, the land seemed to firm and harden, and the path between the marsh and the mud reappeared. The far end of the island was difficult to make out in the haze of the winter day and the south side of the island I couldn’t see at all, hidden as it was by lines of pine trees, planted for some obscure tax reason back in the seventies and now left, unmanageable and unsaleable.

I took a deep breath and felt the cold wind and the cold sun on my face. Either my daughter had passed across that causeway and was gone, or she was somewhere within my gaze on this island. But where? And what should I do? I looked up. Far, far above I saw a trail of smoke in the sky and at the end of it a plane, small as the point of a pin, spilling out the smoke in its wake as it headed away to Europe, the Far East or Australia. People inside that pinprick were settling down to their bloody Marys and miniature bags of salted nuts, their trays of food and their in-flight movie, anticipating the beach or the ski slope. I remembered that we could have been among them and the thought made me gasp as if I’d been struck in the stomach.

I looked beyond the silver plane at the growing blueness of the sky and thought of the stars and the light years of cold, empty space, and I closed my eyes and prayed to the God in whom I didn’t believe. Give me my daughter, I said. Give me my daughter back and give me my son and you can have anything. I’ll do anything. I had uneasy memories of a teacher at school telling us that we shouldn’t bargain with God. But then I had gone away, read the Old Testament and found that it was full of bargains. I remembered a recent walk along the sea wall with Charlie and Sludge, on just such a day as this, bright, windy and cold. I remembered her wild eyes,
her growing body leaning into the wind, Sludge leaping up at her, tongue flapping in happiness. Charlie had looked at me with her hair blowing across her face. Give that moment back to me. I’ll do anything. I’ll go to hell for all eternity if you make my daughter safe.

And I remembered her in the summer, the impossibly distant heat of last August. I had gone to collect her on a late Saturday afternoon when she had been – what was it? Kayaking? Canoeing? Sailing? I had seen her from a distance with a group of people her own age who were too far away to identify. But I could recognize Charlie’s profile anywhere. At that moment I had thought, She’s becoming a woman. And, She has friends I don’t know anything about. At the time it had made me feel happy, complicatedly happy. I remembered how I had seen her throw back her head and laugh. That lovely, carefree sound carried to me over the months that had gone and I could hear it again now as I stood on the barrow in the icy winter silence: a peal of mirth so clear and fresh that I stared wildly around as if Charlie would suddenly be standing in front of me and I could run to her and put my arms round her lean body and hold her safe against me. Of course, no one was there, nothing, and I was alone on a solitary hill.

What now? I wondered if I should go home and wait for the phone to ring. But even if I should, I couldn’t. There was one more thing.

I ran back to the car. As I reached it my mobile rang. Once more, I felt a wave of hope, quickly followed by despair. It wouldn’t be Charlie. I knew that.