Something Might Happen (25 page)

Empty cardboard boxes and crates are piled up outside Somerfield and Ann Slaughter is putting rubbish bags on top of the wheelie
bin outside The Griddle. She nods to me. Some kids are shouting and hanging around outside Mei Yuen’s.

I try to think what I am going to say to Mick. I know I can’t tell the truth, but I can’t bear to lie either. I think I may
just tell him I’ve been in The Polecat. I think I may just—But I don’t get beyond this thought. Mick must have heard the gate,
because he opens the door and rushes out before I can even get the buggy up the path. His face is white, his breath coming
in terrible, jagged gasps. Nat hangs back in the doorway behind him, holding Fletcher by the collar.

He grabs at my arm. Have you got Rosa?

No.

My stomach does a flip.

Rosa? No. Why?

I stare at him.

Mick—what’s happened? Where is she?

His face terrifies me.

Oh my God, I say, beginning to cry. Where is she, Mick, tell me! Where’s she gone?

He stands absolutely still for a moment.

Right, he says, I’m calling the police—

Wasn’t she with you? I say. When did you see her—?

Inside, Jordan is sitting on a kitchen chair in his pyjama top and pants and bare feet, crying. His sleeves are wet with tears
and snot. There are tears in his hair. Pasta sauce on his pyjama top. I pull him onto my lap and wrap my arms around him.

Rosa’s gone, he says again and again, shuddering, sobbing, Rosa’s gone.

Hey, I tell him. Darling, don’t cry, I swear it’ll be OK, we’ll find her.

I say these words over and over while Mick explains.
He speaks slowly and carefully but in between each word his voice tightens as if he can’t quite breathe.

Rosa was here at teatime, he says. She was very helpful, unloading the dishwasher and grating the cheese for the pasta. Not
in a mood or anything. Perfectly normal Rosa. She ate a big plate of spaghetti.

And fromage frais, Nat adds. Two of them.

He kicks at a chair leg as if his limbs are too large for the space, which maybe they are. The laces of his trainers are undone
and fraying.

But—she kept getting up, Jordan says, still heaving with sobs. To look out of the window—

No, Mick says, that was before. That was long before tea, Jordan, please shut up and let me just tell Mummy.

Jordan gives a little sob and I wind my arm tighter around him, flesh on flesh, leaving no space between. As Lacey did to
me barely an hour before.

Mick tells me that he went out the back to take the rubbish out, keeping the door on the latch so that Fletcher couldn’t escape.
Then when he came back in, Rosa wasn’t there but he didn’t worry because he thought she’d gone upstairs.

And anyway she did go upstairs, Nat says. I saw her. She was drawing in her room—

Pictures about Lennie, Jordan says.

I look at Mick and try to take this in and suddenly I feel sick—my insides sick and light, skin damp.

And?

And that’s the last time any of us saw her. In her room, like Nat said. She’s been missing since at least six, maybe earlier.

Oh God.

I put Jordan down on a chair. I am trembling so hard I can barely speak.

Right, I say. Right—

Mick pushes his hands into his eyes.

Jesus Christ, he says.

But she wouldn’t just go, I tell him then. Mick, she wouldn’t. She’s not allowed to just leave the house—you’re sure she’s
not here somewhere, asleep?

Mick looks at me as if I’m mad.

We’ve searched everywhere, he says. What do you think? The garden, the road, we’ve looked bloody everywhere—

And you’ve checked she’s not at Alex’s? Or with Bob?

Bob’s out looking for her now, he says. On the beach and along the front. He won’t stop. He says he’s staying out there until
he finds her.

I stand up and my stomach tips.

We have to call the police. Or Mawhinney.

Mawhinney is the police, Nat says.

Livvy begins to cry and Mick picks her up out of the buggy. He pats her vaguely, holds her against him.

I was only waiting, he says, for you. I was just desperately hoping she was with you somewhere. I mean, where the fuck were
you, Tess?

* * *

Mawhinney says he’ll come straight over.

Mick starts phoning everyone we know, everyone who knows Rosa. I meanwhile pull on a coat and go out with Nat. To the graveyard.
It seems to me quite possible that Rosa might go there. Being Rosa. Especially now. Especially the night before Lennie’s funeral.

St Margaret’s is immense and silent in the half-light from the moon. The white metal gates are pulled across the porch and
locked. I try the handle but it won’t turn.

I thought they never locked it? Nat says.

Sometimes, I tell him. It’s because of Lennie—tomorrow.

The cemetery’s dark and windy—just two exterior lights shining their cold beams on the grass. We go over to the spot next
to the dark spreading yew where Lennie’s grave is already dug. Nat shines the torch in and we both look at the deep drop,
the glossy, sharply spaded sides, the black, black earth.

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks. I touch his shoulder.

Come on, boy, I tell him. Let’s just walk around—

As I walk, I concentrate on keeping breathing, on taking big sensible breaths, keeping focused.

Rosa! I shout, struggling to keep the tears from my voice, Rosa! Rosa! Rosa!

In the darkness the sound of our voices is so huge and strange and loud, the edges of them so blurred, that we have to keep
on stopping to wait for the echo to finish.

Rosa! a! a!

We strain into the silence, listening.

Nothing. Just the wind and a faint metallic clinking sound, probably telegraph wires. And if you listen hard enough, if you
strain, maybe a dull roar that is the sea.

Nothing else. Nothing coming back.

Nat’s quiet. I take his hot hand in mine.

What do you think? I suddenly ask him. Where do you think she’s gone?

He says nothing for a moment, then, Well, you know how weird she is, the way she talks about Lennie as if she isn’t even dead.

So—

Well, she might be looking for her—I mean, she’s pretty stupid when it comes to Lennie.

She thinks she’s seen her, right? I say. Nat makes a dismissive noise in the back of his throat, half laugh, half sob.

I try to remember where Rosa says she’s seen Lennie. Try to think of what kind of crazy thing she might want to do.

The school? I say to Nat. Or maybe the pier?

He gives me a look. I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that even Rosa would never go there. That no one they know would
dream of going anywhere near the pier car park at night—not now, not any more and especially not tonight.

Mawhinney sits in our kitchen. It’s 11
P.M
. Lacey too. Lacey has come not because he’s with the police, but for me. I know this, but I’m not going to think about it
right now.

I can’t look at him. Tonight—now—I just can’t let myself
look. He knows what I’m thinking. Where the fuck was I? Where were you, Tess?

Mick has made coffee. He needs to do things, to boil kettles and move stuff around, to have reasons to get up and down from
his seat. Now he has the phone on the table. He’s been calling people. He is pale and jittery, unable to be still, even for
one single moment. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Only action can bring Rosa back. Anything but sitting, in fact. Sitting and waiting
is what makes you powerless. It’s what makes disasters happen.

Meanwhile, we all keep looking at the door. Even Mawhinney does, even him, he can’t seem to stop himself. Even though he must
be used to these moments.

But maybe that’s how it is when you’ve lost someone—that you can’t help but believe that at any moment they will come walking
through the door and it will all be over. Hugs and tears. Maybe that’s how it was that night for Alex, before he called me,
before the police came and he had to be told, he had to know.

If Rosa came walking in, right now, I try to think what I would do. She’d be hungry and tired and cross. Snapping at everyone.
I’d get her crackers and milk—crackers with goat’s cheese on and milk from the fridge without any lumps in. I try to fix on
this—on the idea of what she’ll ask for.

Mawhinney puts his radio down on the table.

He looks at me. Makes a face. Tries to smile.

The last thing you need, he says. Tonight of all nights.

Yes, I say. It is.

I feel almost calm now. The whole day has been unreal.
And I swear to God that if it could just begin again I would be good—never complaining or making life difficult for Mick.
I would never think of myself again, never, if I could just scratch this day clean and begin it again.

Are you OK? Lacey asks me. Can I get you anything?

No thanks, I say and I shake my head and my fake smile blots him right out.

Mick says he was going to call Alex again but then he thought why do it? If Rosa turns up there then of course he’ll call
us—and if not, then why put another thing on his plate, on this night of all nights?

Meanwhile Bob is still out looking. An old man stumbling along the shingle with a torch. Mick and I agree there’s no point
forcing him home. What else is he going to be doing tonight? He may as well be out there. Mawhinney has a whole bunch of officers
out there, too. He says that in a place this small, it’ll be easy. She can’t have gone far. She’ll be somewhere or other.

Somewhere silly, he says and I know he says it to reassure me. Little girls are strange creatures, aren’t they? he says. Very
hard indeed to say what’s going on in those heads of theirs.

I get up and go to the toilet. My body empties—everything. I am perspiring. I splash cold water on my face, it drips down
my wrists, into my clothes. I haven’t washed since the sea. My arms and wrists still smell of it, of him.

I haven’t been taking enough notice of her, I tell them
all as I come back into the room. Because the truth swoops in on me, sudden and terrifying.

Don’t blame yourself, Mawhinney says.

But it’s true, I say in a quiet dull voice. I haven’t.

None of us have, Mick says.

Straightaway I resent how he has to lump himself in with me.

You’ve been a perfectly good father, I tell him. You’ve been great. You know it. You always are, you’re fine.

Can she swim? Lacey asks after a moment or two.

Oh yes, I tell him. She’s done three badges.

But, says Mick, she’s not allowed in the sea alone, obviously.

She’d never try and go in alone, I tell him, horrified. Not now, not at night—

He agrees with me and he looks at Lacey.

She’s quite sensible, I hear one of us say.

Mawhinney sighs and writes something down on his pad. It seems to be a phone number, but it could be just a scribble.

Lacey sits with his two bare hands on the table, perfectly still. His face is white and his eyes are pink with exhaustion.

He seems to think of something.

Is she upset? he asks us. Do you think she was perhaps feeling upset about tomorrow?

Mick looks at me.

Well, they all are, he says. All the kids, naturally. But not especially, no, no more than any of the others—

He seems to be about to go on, but then gives up and puts his head in his hands.

Then I remember.

No, I say. She is, Mick—she’s been drawing these things—

In a stiff and unreal way, I feel myself get up from the table and move across the room. Fetching the scrunched-up piece of
paper that I pulled from the paw of Rosa’s kitten.

I open it out to show them. I wait for them to look. It now has a pale brown stain on it—tea or coffee—got from lying on the
kitchen table all afternoon probably. But still—the careful words and pictures: A Map Of Where To Find It.

Look, I say. Look, she did this.

What? says Mick, What is it?

It’s Lennie’s heart, these pink things are hearts. And the sea. And there’s Lennie—

Mick stares at me. I ignore him. Mawhinney leans over to see. So does Lacey. They all try to see. Why can’t they see? I wait
for them to understand.

A Map Of Where To Find It, I tell them.

It? says Mick.

Her heart. Look, I say, raising my voice now, surely you can see what it is—? Can’t you? It’s a map—

Mick touches my hand.

It’s just one of her little drawings, Tess. She’s always doing these funny drawings, he tells Mawhinney.

A map of where to find it, I tell them again. Breathing hard, through my teeth.

But Lacey looks serious.

You think that’s what it is, he says. That’s she’s off somewhere trying to find Lennie’s heart?

I close my eyes with relief.

Yes, I tell him. Yes, I do. That’s what I think.

Mick puts his arm around me.

Oh Tess, he says and I feel his body tremble against mine.

No, Mick, I mean it.

It’s a game of hers, he says, the Lennie thing. A mad little game. Come on, you said so yourself.

I shake him off me.

It’s not a game, I tell them. It’s deadly serious. She thinks she’s seen Lennie. She thinks Lennie talks to her. You know
Rosa, Mick. I swear to you, she thinks it’s absolutely real.

Mawhinney gets up and goes over and starts rinsing out his coffee mug at the sink.

Oh please, I say. You don’t need to do that.

He looks odd and wrong standing there at our kitchen sink. His big wrists look suddenly futile as he lays the mug on the draining
board and glances around for somewhere to wipe his hands.

I can’t bear it. I hand him a tea towel.

Could I—can I have a cigarette off you? I ask him in a low voice. He’s never smoked in my presence but I’ve seen
him stop to light up the moment he gets out on those bald white steps of the pier.

He hands me the whole pack, slightly squashed and almost full.

Really, he says, when I try to give them back. You’d be doing me a favour. I’m trying to smoke less.

He hands the tea towel back to me as well. I put it to my face and use it to wipe away the tears that keep on coming.