Losing You (8 page)

I had woken into a new world, a world that was cold and harsh and entirely different from anything I had ever imagined for myself, and I had to think about it carefully and with clarity. I had got up this morning and been one person and now I was another. I was a woman whose daughter, aged fifteen, had run away from home. I had a daughter who had secretly gathered together a few pathetic possessions and some money and had gone out into a biting December day rather than be in this home with me. There was somewhere else she would rather be, perhaps someone else she would rather be with. Anywhere but here.

There was something I found hard to confess even to myself. It was the single most shameful thing I had ever felt in my entire life. I felt embarrassed. Gradually, the people around me, family, friends, acquaintances, neighbours, would hear that Nina Landry was a mother whose daughter had run away from home. Parents having terrible rows with their children would comfort themselves by saying, ‘At least I’m a better parent than Nina Landry. Relations with my children may be bad, but they haven’t run away, not like that daughter of Nina Landry’s.’ I imagined the next few days, bumping into people in the street. A look of surprise. ‘I thought you were on holiday.’ ‘We had to cancel – unfortunately my daughter…’

Gradually, as word spread, I would be met not by a look of surprise but of awkwardness, followed by a murmured
word of sympathy delivered with the glint of excitement we feel about the disasters of other people.

It was awful and contemptible, but it was what went through my mind and I made myself think about it as if I were plunging my hand into boiling water and holding it there.

I poured myself another cup of coffee and sipped it. If I included the nine months of pregnancy, with its nausea, apprehension and lurching anticipation, this was the first moment for about sixteen and a half years that I hadn’t known where my daughter was. I had to decide what to do. I picked up the phone and called Renata’s mobile.

‘Nobody’s seen anything of her,’ she said, ‘but –’

‘I know,’ I said, interrupting her. ‘You can come back now. I’ll tell you about it.’

‘Don’t you want us to –’

‘No,’ I said, and hung up.

What were my possibilities? The policeman had made Charlie’s departure seem like just another of those things that happen as children grow up, like birthday parties and Brownies. According to that view, I could get on with my life, with a few regrets and sniffles, and wait for my daughter to be in touch. I only had to articulate that to myself to realize how impossible it was. I had to find Charlie and talk to her, even if the only result of it was that she told me things I didn’t want to know. I tried to think what other mothers would do and it just wouldn’t compute. I was stuck with myself and there was nothing I could do about it. Charlie was fifteen years old, she was my child and I had to find her. Everything else could wait. So, where did I start?

My first impulse was to jump into the car, drive, stop
strangers in the street and just do anything and everything until she was found. Hysteria and instant action might have made me feel better, or stopped me dwelling on things that were painful, but I needed to be effective. I reached for the pad that I kept on the kitchen table for shopping lists. It had a pen attached to it by a Velcro strip. I ripped it off and doodled as I tried to order my thoughts.

Charlie had taken a few possessions with her so she must have run away from someone or with someone or to someone. She could have gone to stay at a friend’s. The worst possibility was that, whatever Rick had said, she had up and gone alone, hitched a lift, left with no plans and no destination, just heading away. I thought of Charlie standing by a road, thumbing a lift, getting into a stranger’s car, leaving us all behind, and felt a stinging in my eyes. For the first time in my life I thought of killing myself and then I thought of Jackson and Charlie and put that idea away for ever.

What was most likely was that she would be with a friend, or that a friend would know of her plans. If I could find someone to put me in touch with Charlie, I could talk to her and she could tell me what had gone wrong between us. Where to start? At some point before the party had begun, while I was out having my car fixed, Charlie had returned to the house, retrieved what she needed and gone. Her decision to leave, or at least her decision to leave today, before going on holiday, must have been sudden or she would have taken her purse and washbag to Ashleigh’s. One guest after another at the party had told me how Charlie had organized it. I knew my daughter was a wonderfully strange and chaotic girl, but would even she organize a surprise party for her mother on the day she was going to run away from home?

Now a thought occurred to me. Could it have been that something had happened at the sleepover to provoke this crisis? I wondered what could have made her run away instead of coming to me. I couldn’t think of a scenario that made sense but it was clear I had to start with the sleepover. I reached for the phone book, then remembered I didn’t need to: Joel’s home number was on my mobile. Another life, another story. I clicked on it and rang the number but it was engaged. A voice asked me to leave a message but I couldn’t say to a machine anything of what was needed. Rather than wait, I decided to drive over – his house was only a couple of minutes away. I left a scrawled note to Renata on the kitchen table and got into the car. I drove along the front and turned right into Flat Lane, which led inland. I pulled up outside Alix and Joel’s whitewashed thatched cottage, a tasteful anomaly in a road of terraced houses that could have been in the suburbs of any large English city.

I rang the doorbell, then rapped hard with a heavy wrought-iron knocker. Alix opened the door with the phone at her ear, gave me a look of puzzlement and gestured me inside. I hovered on the threshold while she continued with her conversation. She turned away from me, as if to keep her privacy, but I could hear she was having a professional conversation with someone at her practice. It sounded like a routine discussion about a rota because someone was ill. This was ridiculous. I took a deep breath and tapped her shoulder. She looked round, frowning. Was I really telling her to get off the phone, as if she were a garrulous teenager? Yes, I was.

‘It’s urgent,’ I mouthed at her.

‘Sorry, Ros,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to call you back. There seems to be some sort of emergency.’

Alix put a sarcastic emphasis on the word ‘seems’ but she hung up. ‘Karen’s not too bad,’ she said. ‘I just got back from the hospital. She was seen at once because of the bleeding. She’s had some stitches and the break in the arm was quite nasty. She’ll have to stay for the night at least. Rick’s stuck there with her, poor man. It’s a greenstick fracture. Do you know what that is? It’s like when you get a twig and snap and it doesn’t break off –’

‘It’s not about that,’ I said. ‘Charlie’s missing.’

Alix looked at me quizzically. ‘Missing?’

I gave her a rundown of the events of the morning. I saw a familiar expression of disbelief appear on her face. ‘But it’s only been a couple of hours.’

‘Not a normal couple of hours. We were about to leave for the airport. I know it’s shocking and inexplicable but Charlie has taken her stuff and run off and… I don’t know…’

There was a moment when I almost let the tears run from my eyes. I had the temptation to let go, to howl, put my arms round Alix and ask for comfort and help. But a glance at her sceptical, detached expression made me take control again. This wasn’t the right shoulder to cry on. And this wasn’t the time to collapse. I took a deep breath. ‘I’ll need to talk to Tam,’ I said.

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?’