Stranded (32 page)

I check the grown-ups. Nobody is Chris. His balding head and ponytail make him easy to identify, and he is definitely not here. None of these people is even Zoe. My only hope, the owner of the sole phone number I managed to remember, is not here.

The airport staff look at me in a strange, almost nervous way, but they do what I ask in the end.

‘Your daughter?’ asks a uniformed man, raising his eyebrows. ‘Well, yes, that’s what we’re here for.’ I could swear that he looks at a colleague and widens his eyes, but perhaps I am paranoid, because he does not know me and his job is to put out tannoy messages for people, so there is nothing odd about my request.

‘Will Daisy Lomax and her father or companion please report to the information desk at arrivals,’ he says, and he repeats it a few minutes later. ‘There you go,’ he says. We are at the information desk, but I find his manner odd, so I walk a little way away and look and wait. I cannot stand still, so I walk up and down, and round in circles, then go back.

After half an hour, I have to accept that Daisy is not here.

I have no money. I have nobody to collect me. I have no working phone, no credit card and nobody to help. There are no options. The only thing I can possibly do is wait.

I try to fill in the Daisy-shaped gap. She’s fine, she’s with Zoe or another friend. She’s fine, she’s with Chris’s mum. We may never have liked one another, but I could entrust Daisy to her care. She’s fine, she’s at school. I had not thought about school, but I suppose it is termtime now. We must be somewhere in the first half of the summer term. There might be a school play. Daisy might have a part in it. She always wants a part in the play; ideally, one that involves singing while dressing as a man.

The hand on my shoulder takes me by surprise, and I jump, my heart leaps and I turn around to gather her into my arms.

‘Sorry, Esther,’ says Ed, and I blink away the disappointment. I cannot cry because she must be somewhere, and I need to find her. This is not a time to feel sorry for myself.

‘Ed,’ I say, blank and hopeless. ‘Didn’t you go with your parents?’

He smiles. His arm is around my shoulders, and I lean in gratefully.

‘We’ve got a connecting flight,’ he says. ‘To Edinburgh. It’s from Terminal One in a couple of hours – it’s Patch’s wedding the day after tomorrow, so we’re not going home first. Apparently they’ve got clothes for me and stuff. It will be a little surreal. But I didn’t want to go anywhere till I’d seen you with Daisy. I wanted to meet her. I took the parents into Costa, to their horror, and then I heard the tannoy announcement.’ He looks me in the eyes. ‘She’s not here.’

‘Nobody’s here,’ I admit. ‘No one. Not Chris, not Zoe. And I don’t know where to go or what to do and I haven’t got any money and . . .’ I stop, for no other reason than because I cannot talk any more.

‘Can I come to Brighton with you?’

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘You have to go to your brother’s wedding.’

‘Well, I can obviously miss that. I wasn’t planning on going, was I? Not when we were on the island. Let’s go to Brighton together. It’s just near here, isn’t it?’

I smile despite myself.

‘No, it’s just near Gatwick. This is Heathrow. And you have to go to Patch’s wedding, Ed. I’m a grown-up. I’m forty years old. I’ll deal with this. I can always phone you. Can I?’

‘Of course you can, you idiot. You’ve got my home numbers, and look, the parents have their mobile, so I’ll write its number down for you. Ring on this any time. You know that. And call me when you find her, OK?’ He stops, then turns me to face him and looks me directly in the eyes, his hands on both of my shoulders. ‘You do realise this is your ex getting back at you for not coming home? Once you’re face to face, you can explain the bizarre truth and get everything back to normal. And Esther, here’s some cash. I got it out with Mum’s bank card. It’s yours. You’re not paying it back.’

He hands me a thick wad of folded-up notes.

‘I am,’ I tell him. ‘And Ed. There aren’t enough words to say . . . Without you, I don’t know what . . .’

He holds me close and kisses me. I kiss him back, dreading our separation and the fact that I am going to have to do this on my own. I wish I had let him come with me.

As I turn to walk away from him towards the bus stop, I see the people who must be his parents watching me from a distance, unsmiling.

I have to take a bus to Gatwick, where I get on to a little train to Brighton. The Brighton to London line is so familiar that I feel sick. I look around at the other people on the train. It is not a commuter train: most of the other passengers look like students or travellers. I wonder what their stories are. I bet that not one of them has been abandoned on an island for twenty-nine days.

Already the experience seems so unreal that I wonder if I could have imagined it. In all our shared fantasies of rescue, we never supposed that we would return to the outside world to be met by profound indifference.

Brighton station is the same as it ever was. I am home, but it is not home until I have Daisy. I see her in the crowd, see her face everywhere. I see her in the adverts. Every little girl (and there are, I instantly establish, three in the station) is Daisy for a second, until she is not. One girl looks the way Daisy did when she was about three. For a few mad seconds I think it might be her. Everything is so odd that the idea of time moving backwards while we were on the island is as good an explanation as anything. Every possible man is Chris, and then not Chris.

There is nobody here that I know. In my paranoia I imagine that people are giving me disapproving looks, frowning at me like Ed’s parents witnessing their ignored middle son kissing a woman a decade his senior. I walk out into the grey mist, and follow the well-worn path home. Turn right, up the hill, and onwards until, fifteen minutes later, I am standing outside my house.

It is in front of me, small, white and terraced. Even the house seems to be giving me a judgemental look.

‘I got stranded,’ I tell it, grumpily, before realising that, since I have nothing, I have no key. The neighbour, Marjie, has one, and I bang on her door. She opens it quickly, the phone tucked between shoulder and ear. When she sees me, she frowns, but does not stop her conversation.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but if you’re meaning that I need to back-pay it from November, then I’m afraid you’ve another think coming.’ She looks at me with some distaste, and I wish I could take her phone away and explain why I have only just come home.

‘Key?’ I ask instead, miming the unlocking of a door, and being brief to fit the amount of attention she has for me.

She nods and takes if off a little hook on the wall, while saying, ‘I assure you I do
not
owe anything like that amount.’

She hands it to me, shaking her head, and slams the door behind me.

It is a ghost house, exactly the way I left it six weeks or so ago. Six weeks is not even a long time, though it is, conspicuously, long enough for the kitchen to start to smell. The air inside is musty, and although I am cold, I open a few windows. There are no sheets on my bed: I remember bundling them all into the laundry basket before I left, Daisy’s and mine.

Daisy’s room is empty. She has not been here. Her cuddly bear, Poley, is missing, as are the clothes she took with her to stay with Chris. Poley should be here, though. She has a spare one at Chris’s house. I stand in the centre of the small room and look at the evidence of my daughter.

There are posters of animals on her walls. I love it that she is still childish enough for her pin-ups to be puppies and horses. There are toys spilling out of her toy box, and her books are haphazard in her bookcase, slumping on top of one another, piled up horizontally on top. I look at the titles: they range from some of the picture books she liked as a toddler, the special ones she has kept for sentimental reasons (
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
, for instance), through a collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harry Potter, to her current favourites, which mainly feature vampires and werewolves.

I put new sheets on her bed, taking care to make it perfect, and arrange her things so she will have a home to come back to tonight. I open all the windows to air the house. Then I call her school to let them know that I am home and that I will be collecting her this afternoon.

That, at least, is the reason I give myself. In fact, I just want to know for certain that she is there. It is either call the school or go up there and demand to have her pulled out of a lesson.

‘Hello,’ I say, when the office staff answer. I put on the most grown-up, least wobbly voice I can muster. ‘This is Esther Lomax, Daisy’s mum.’

‘Oh,’ says the woman in the office. ‘What can we do for you, Mrs Lomax?’

I think I hear a reaction in the background when she says my name, but then I realise I am paranoid and confused and must be imagining it.

‘Well,’ I say, struggling to be poised. ‘I’m home from Asia, rather later than planned, because I got stuck on an island for a month.’

‘Stuck on an island,’ she says drily. ‘I see. Quite a hardship.’

‘And I’ve just got back to Brighton and I can’t find anyone, and so I just thought I’d let you know that I’ll be at school to pick Daisy up this afternoon.’

There is a lengthy pause. Then the woman says:

‘But Mrs Lomax, Daisy is no longer a pupil at this school.’

‘What?’ I struggle to respond to this. ‘Yes she is! What happened? Where are they?’

‘Your ex-husband withdrew her.’ I cannot frame a response to that, and after a few seconds she continues. ‘You signed the paperwork, Mrs Lomax. That is to say, I have here a piece of paper with your signature on it. We were led to understand that you were spending a lengthy period of time abroad.’

‘Not through choice!’ I try not to shout, pause, and take a deep breath. ‘I was stuck. I had no choice. Where did he take her?’

‘It says on the paperwork . . .’ I hear it rustling in the background, ‘that she was moving schools. That is all we know, Mrs Lomax.’

I slam the phone down. There is nothing else to say to this woman. Before I have even drawn breath, I am halfway out of the front door. I remember that I am still dressed for the Asian beach, and that I have all my clothes in the wardrobe upstairs, but I cannot bear to go back and change. With nothing in my hand but my keys, and a pair of flip-flops on my feet, I run to Chris’s flat as quickly as I possibly can. I tear across roads trusting that they are not busy and that nobody is going fast enough to pose a proper danger to me, and somehow, no car mows me down. I swerve around pedestrians, glad to be in a place where no one pays much attention to someone who is behaving oddly. I nearly crash into a heavily pregnant woman as I round the last corner, but she manages to step out of the way. I do not see the look she gives me, but I can imagine it from her exclaimed ‘Fucking hell!’

Chris lives in an upstairs flat in a big house in Albany Villas, close to the seafront. I run up the sturdy front steps and press his buzzer, not bothering to take my finger off it. I know he will not answer, and indeed he does not. I try his neighbours, but none of them answer either, even though I know that his upstairs neighbours are a retired male couple and that one or other of them is in the entire time.

Back at home, I try to stem the panic. I am her mother. I have to be rational. Mothers sort things out. They do not fall apart and do random things.

I charge my phone up, finally, enough to be able to switch it on. Chris’s number is in the address book.

It rings.

After three rings, it is picked up, and my ex-husband’s voice says, in tones of obvious astonishment: ‘Esther?’

‘Where is she?’ I demand. There is no time for explanations or small talk.

‘Where are
you
?’ he counters. ‘And what the hell? I never thought we were going to hear from you again. Until you left those mad-as-hell messages on my machine at home the other day. Zoe said you spoke to her. Esther, you can’t just bugger off and then come back and shout at
me
!’

‘I didn’t bugger off!’ I yell. ‘I was left on a fucking island without anything at all, for a month. Where is our daughter? She’s not at school, Chris. What is going on?’

He pauses.

‘Oh,’ he says, too late for his casual tone to be convincing. ‘Well. Considering what you said earlier, you’re in no position to complain. She’s with her grandmother.’

I exhale in relief. ‘Your mother? But why on earth did you pull her out of school? Can’t your mother drive her in from Haywards Heath? Anyway, Daisy’s not going to be with your mother for ever. And what do you mean about what I said earlier? I don’t think I said anything earlier, did I? Apart from “where’s Daisy”?’

‘Um.’ I hear him take a deep breath. He is suddenly deeply uncomfortable. ‘Um, Esther. We probably need to talk. It’s not my mother she’s with. It’s yours.’

And every fear that has been bubbling under the surface, every terror that I have repressed, suddenly rises up and explodes.

‘Chris,’ I say. ‘What the hell have you done?’

He says he will come straight over. I go upstairs to Daisy’s room and sit on her bed, and know that I have failed her utterly.

‘Sorry,’ I whisper to the puppies and ponies on her posters. The places where the pictures are ripped around the edges, where the corners are bending upwards, are unbearably poignant. I take a jumper out of her drawer at random and bury my face in it. I climb into her bed.

I knew that one day they would try to do this. I wanted to believe they wouldn’t, but now it seems crashingly inevitable. I will have to untangle what has happened, and how; but before that I need to rescue my poor baby daughter.

It is important to be practical. A shower is the first step, to be followed by clean and presentable clothes. I will dry my hair and track down my make-up and see if I can remember how to put it on. Shoes, I think, vaguely, too. Shoes are good. I know where I am going, and I need to look confident to carry this off. The moment I step back there I am going to want to turn into a sulky teenager again.