I Found You (19 page)

‘Come on,’ said Gray, ‘let’s go.’

The lilies in the hallway were dying. Their heavy white heads had drooped, leaving dustings of yellow pollen on the pale tiled floor and a deathly, stagnant odour. No dogs ran to greet them. The house was still and silent.

‘Where’s your aunt?’ said Gray.

‘What?’ Mark replied absent-mindedly.

‘Your aunt. Where is she?’

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘You said she was here.’

‘Well, maybe she is,’ he countered. ‘Maybe she’s asleep.’

They all followed Mark through to a room at the back of the house. It was a small, square room with an open fireplace, a sofa and two big armchairs and there, in the corner, a fully fitted mahogany bar. Mark leaned down, lifted a flap on the panelling, hit a switch and the whole thing lit up. There were bottles of spirits attached to the wall, shiny cocktail shakers, shelves of cut glasses, a tub of drinking straws and glass swizzle sticks, an ice tub with silver tongs, a small sink, a small fridge filled with beers and wine, and three bar stools with red leather seats.

‘Right,’ said Mark, standing behind the bar, his hands clasped together. ‘Who’s for what?’

The girls asked for gin and tonics; Alex asked for a whisky sour; Gray asked for a beer.

‘What about you, Kirsty?’

‘Do you have any Coke?’

Mark laughed. ‘Whoa, little one, bit early in the night for that!’

‘I meant, like – no, I meant Coca-Cola.’

‘I know what you meant,’ he said, smiling at her indulgently. He slid a CD into a player beneath the bar and hit another switch. Immediately the room was filled with the sound of A Tribe Called Quest. Gray looked around and saw four speakers, one in each corner of the ceiling. Mark turned up the bass and the beat thrummed though the floorboards, through his feet. He popped the cap off a beer for Gray using a bottle opener screwed to the side of the bar and passed it to him. Gray drank it fast. Izzy and Harrie were sitting at the bar on the stools, whispering and giggling conspiratorially into each other’s ears while Mark made their cocktails. Kirsty stood at Gray’s side, sipping her Coke through a straw, bobbing up and down slightly to the beat of the music.

‘Why did you come?’ he whispered in her ear, loudly to be heard over the deafening music.

‘Because I felt like it,’ she whispered back into his.

‘Yeah, but why?’

‘I dunno. I suppose I didn’t want you to sit there tomorrow morning telling me what an amazing time you’d had. Didn’t want to be the loser at home in her pyjamas.’ She fixed him with a penetrating look. ‘Why did
you
come?’

He glanced at Izzy, just as Izzy looked away from Harrie and glanced at him.

Kirsty nodded knowingly. ‘She’s way out of your league.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ he said.

‘Seriously. Look at her. And she’s older than you.’

‘Only just. A few months.’

She looked at him sceptically.

‘A year,’ he said. ‘That’s nothing.’

‘And where does she live?’

‘Harrogate,’ he said. ‘Like Mark. They all know each other from posh world. Polo and stuff.’

Kirsty rolled her eyes. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘good luck with that.’

‘I think she thinks I’m
different
.’

‘Well, that’s for sure.’

‘Look, it’s not as if we’re fucking urchins, you know. We’re not that different.’

Kirsty gestured at the high-ceilinged room, the lit-up bar, the chesterfield sofa, the leather-topped fenders and the brass chandelier overhead.

‘I mean, intrinsically,’ said Gray. ‘Inside. We live in a nice house, we go to perfectly OK schools, we
have holidays and a decent car. Mum and Dad drink wine.’

‘Yes, but there’s a big difference between that and this.’

‘Whatever,’ he said, ‘I just don’t think it matters. Not when two people have a . . .
connection
.’

Kirsty rolled her eyes.

‘Cheers,’ said everyone as Mark passed out the cocktails. Gray turned and brushed his beer against Izzy’s cocktail. She held his gaze for a split second and smiled. Then she looked away again and he followed her gaze to Mark, who was laying out a row of small white pills on the surface of the bar.

Izzy rubbed her hands together and said, ‘Oooh! Goody!’

Gray stifled a groan. He should have guessed. Posh kids and drugs.

‘No, thank you,’ he said when Mark pushed one towards him with a fingertip.

Mark looked at him disapprovingly. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said.

‘No, honestly. I’m fine with the beer.’

Izzy nudged him. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s only E. You can share one with me if you want.’

‘Seriously, it’s not my thing.’

‘Oh, Gray. You’re so adorable.’

This time the ‘adorable’ didn’t strike him as a compliment.

‘I’ll share one with you,’ said Kirsty, gently touching his arm.

‘What! No way! You’re fifteen! I can’t take you back to Mum and Dad off your tits on E.’

‘Tell you what,’ said Mark, leaning across the bar on his elbows, ‘why don’t you two share half. A quarter each. You’ll barely notice anything. And you’ll be back to normal by the time you get home.’

‘Then what’s the point?

‘It’ll just take the edge off. You know. Make the world seem a little nicer for a little while.’

‘Oh, please, Gray.’ Izzy held his arm. Then she pulled him to her and put her face right next to his: the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, her bare arm around his waist. ‘Please.’

‘Seriously,’ said Mark, ‘it’ll just be like an extra-nice hour of your life and then you’ll be home safe in bed.’

Gray shrugged, knowing he was losing the battle and feeling a small unfamiliar part of him telling him that, actually, it might be fun and that maybe the chemical boost might be what it took finally to get him across the line between being ‘adorable’ and being a guy that Izzy might want to kiss.

He nodded and Mark smiled and cracked a pill into halves, gave one half to Izzy, halved the other and gave a tiny chunk each to Kirsty and Gray.

‘Are you sure?’ Gray mouthed at Kirsty. She nodded back at him and they swallowed the pill fragments down.

Mark passed Gray another beer and Kirsty another Coke and turned the music up even louder and the lights off, so that the room was lit only by the bar lights and a church candle burning on the coffee table behind them.

Gray and Kirsty watched the others for a while, the almost theatrical performance of their conversation, the hooting back and forth, the in-jokes and the banter. Gray was beginning to think he’d imagined the mutual attraction between Izzy and himself when suddenly Izzy’s cousin turned to him and said, ‘So, Gray, do you have a girlfriend? Down in Croydon?’

Izzy nudged Harrie in the ribs and threw her a mock-horrified look. ‘Harrie!’

‘What?’ said Harrie. ‘I was just asking.’

‘No,’ Kirsty interjected, ‘he doesn’t have a girlfriend. In fact, he’s never had a girlfriend—’

Gray clamped his hand over his sister’s mouth and wrestled her halfway to the floor. She fought back and resurfaced, pinning Gray’s arms down to say, ‘He’s never even kissed anyone, apart from our mum.’

He pushed her back down to the floor and said, ‘That’s not true. Seriously. She’s just saying that because she hates me.’

‘You know what? I don’t think I kissed a girl till I was seventeen,’ said the taciturn, slightly cross-eyed boy called Alex. ‘Or was it sixteen? Actually, might have been thirteen. I don’t know. I do remember thinking it was a long time to wait, anyway.’

‘I’ll kiss you,’ said Izzy, turning to Gray.

Gray let go of Kirsty and blinked. ‘What? Look, it’s not true that I haven’t, so you don’t need to kiss me just to be kind.’

‘Oh, Gray, I promise you, kindness has nothing to do with it.’

And then, before he could protest or even decide if he wanted to protest, she was kissing him, in front of everyone: her arms tight around his neck, her tongue in his mouth, her small breasts hard against his chest.

He struggled briefly against her embrace, but soon the animalistic thud of the music, the golden darkness, the raw atmosphere, the tequilas, the beers, the E and this girl, here, in his arms, the taste of her mouth, the genuine desire coming from her and into him, all combined to bring him to a state of oblivion where the two of them were all that existed. His head swam with kaleidoscopic images, changing, moving, diverging and converging and then pulsating in time to the music into what he suddenly realised was the unfurled fan of a peacock’s tail. It shimmered in his mind’s eye, the great span of it, the iridescent layers of green and indigo and purple, dancing and swaying.
He lost himself for a moment in the beauty of the thing, losing consciousness for a while of the fact that he was kissing Izzy, that her hands were in his hair, that the others were watching and cheering and whooping and clapping, that this was crazy, what was happening, just crazy. When they finally drew apart he looked into her eyes and he saw the peacock markings there, in her irises, and he leaned into her ear and said, ‘You are beautiful.’ And she leaned into his ear and said, ‘You are beautiful too.’

On the other side of the bar Mark pulled a small bag from his pocket, lined up another set of pills on the counter. Again he broke one in half. He pushed one half towards Gray, the other towards Izzy.

This time Gray didn’t need to be persuaded.

‘Hello?’ Lily almost whispers. ‘Is that Mrs Monrose?’

‘No,’ says the quietly spoken woman, ‘I think you may have the wrong number.’

‘No, I’m sorry, I know that’s not your name. Of course. My name is Lily. I spoke to you a few weeks ago. After the marriage to your son.’

There is a short, tense silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ says the woman, ‘I still think you have the wrong number. I don’t have a son. I don’t know anyone called Lily.’

‘But this number. It is on my husband’s phone bill. It is the number he called when I spoke to his mother. After our wedding. It is
you
.’

‘I think there has been some confusion,’ says the woman. ‘A misprint, maybe. I don’t have a son. I don’t have any children at all.’

‘But I recognise your voice!’

‘No,’ she says vaguely, ‘no, I don’t think so.’

Lily can hear her voice becoming distant as she moves the phone away from her ear. She shouts, ‘You
are
his mother! Why are you lying?’ Then she stops, reins in her temper. ‘He’s missing, you know? He’s been missing for five days. Please, when I go, will you take down my number, immediately? Write it down. Somewhere safe. Please. If you hear from him, you must let me know.’

The line buzzes and dies. The woman has hung up.

The door to the house is locked. Alice and Frank walk towards the gate at the side of the house that leads into the gardens. This too is locked, with a rusting padlock and curls of barbed wire on top. They return to the front door and peer through the windows on either side through cupped hands; they see a curved hallway with tiled floors and a sweeping staircase up to a wide half-landing bathed in sun. Grand double doors lead off from both sides, and there are more doors behind the staircase. Frank sighs.

‘Are you OK?’ says Alice.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Fine.’

‘No more memories?’

‘Not yet.’

They clamber through the flowerbed outside the front-left window and reach awkwardly to look through into the room beyond. It’s a dining room, with a long table covered in books and piles of paper, a brass chandelier, a fireplace with matching leather wing chairs on each side, other unidentifiable pieces of furniture hidden under dust sheets. They repeat the action on the right-hand side of the house. Here there is a grand sitting room with three dust-sheet-covered sofas in a U shape, an ornate fireplace with a gilt mirror above, more dust sheets and cardboard boxes. It looks almost as though the inhabitant had been halfway through moving house when they left.

Alice takes out her smartphone when she hears a ringtone nearby. She looks at the screen, but it’s black. She puts the phone back in her pocket, and then starts slightly when she hears a phone ringing again. She takes her phone back out of her pocket, looks at the black screen again. The ringing continues and continues and continues. She looks at Frank.

‘Where’s that coming from?’ she asks.

He turns his ear to the house. ‘It sounds like it’s coming from inside.’

They stand for a while in the flowerbed, statue-still, listening to the phone ringing. Finally it stops; then a moment later it starts again.

A chill runs through Alice and she looks anxiously at Frank. He has clearly understood the significance of
the ringing phone in the empty house. Within days of Frank arriving in Ridinghouse Bay and within hours of him remembering having been in this house, a phone is ringing and ringing behind the locked door. It can’t be unrelated.

They ring the doorbell once, twice, three times. And then both move away from the house to look up towards the windows on the upper floors. They’re looking for shadowy movements, for any sign of life. But there’s nothing. Drawn curtains, dark glass. And the eerie, haunting sound of an unanswered phone ringing into oblivion.

‘Come on,’ says Alice, taking hold of Frank’s shoulder, ‘let’s go home.’

He pauses, looking reluctant to move from this place. But then his shoulders soften and he turns to Alice and smiles and says, ‘Yes. OK.’

‘We can always come back.’

‘Yes. We can.’

The phone is still ringing as they crunch back across the driveway, its desperate insistence fading to a distant complaint as they step over the rusting chains and then swallowed up completely by the roar of passing cars as they step back on to the pavement.

For a while they walk in silence. It’s hard to know what to say.

‘Any theories?’ Alice tries as they round the corner and see the comforting jumble of town below them.

Frank looks blank, shell-shocked. He shakes his head.

She tries again. ‘Someone really wants to talk to someone in that house.’