One week after her last gathering, Mia had guests again. This time there were only two, Keira and Dominic, but Mia always took hosting seriously. She’d filled bowls with pretzels, with M&Ms, with blueberries, and strewn them casually on the floor of her bedroom. They had no plans but to loll there, picking at the snacks with lazy hands. Rachel occasionally refreshed their glasses with the sparkling elderflower Mia had insisted upon. She savoured those minutes in the room with them. She wanted to see Mia relaxed, to decode her actions. Each time she poured from the bottle, the girls nodded their approval, but Dominic voiced his.
‘You spoil us, Ms Collins, but you know we love it.’ There was always a twinkle of the wicked in his grin.
Mia lay across the bed with her ankles resting on Dominic’s thighs. The three were intimate in a way Rachel could never quite fathom. With only an eighteen-month age gap, Keira and Dominic were close. Dominic was in Year 12, two school years above, but acted like their peer. He seemed to dote on the girls, fitting into the space in Mia’s life where a sibling might be. Rachel often felt a pang that she and Tim hadn’t managed a second child, that they’d left Mia stranded in a generation of her own, with no playmate, no ally. Rachel was grateful for Dominic. But she was curious about his willingness to spend his time with a younger group. She wondered if his devotion to Mia ran deeper, or if his preferences lay elsewhere, and the girls served as a safe space. She left the door ajar, so snatches of their conversation reached her own room.
Keira’s voice was as loud as ever, but she relaxed around the other two. The enforced japery faded when the group was smaller. ‘I know what Abby’s message said, but even if we’re allowed, I’m not really sure. It’s only been a week since she went.’
Dominic seemed to agree. ‘I know what you mean. It’s crazy, but it feels sort of wrong. Does that even make sense?’
‘Yeah. And I know Ella will be pissed off if we don’t go tomorrow, and she’s right, it’s not like there’s some predator out there, it’s not like anyone’s watching us, but it feels kind of weird.’ Keira was softer now. ‘Are you guys worried?’
There was a shuffling, as if they were changing position, moving around the room, maybe just reaching for the snack bowls. Dominic’s voice was muffled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. I think about whether Lily’s having an okay time, whether she’s alright.’
Rachel’s breaths became shallow, her body rigid.
Dominic’s response was swift. ‘Lily wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want to.’
There was silence, then a snort, a sound that Rachel knew to be distinctly Mia. ‘Why do we even care, though? It’s ridiculous. I mean, she chose to go.’
There was a strain to her voice. Even across the hallway, Rachel could sense it. There was something she hadn’t heard there before. Even in the days they’d feared the most for Lily, there wasn’t that tension, that pitch that felt forced. Rachel sat, straight-backed, desperate to catch every sound, but could hear only the click of the door shutting.
Rachel lay on her bed. She tried to claw back some of the sleep she’d missed over the last week, but her eyelids wouldn’t seal themselves shut. Whatever she thought of, however deliberately she breathed, she found herself staring at the wall. It had been weeks since she’d last shared a bed with Mark. Since she’d fought sleep rather than longed for it, since she’d abandoned herself to the exhaustion of the next day. She’d almost looked forward to the mid-afternoon slump that would remind her of what she’d been doing instead of resting.
Her skin had been cooler then; the warmth of his hands had been welcome. He’d lain her on her front, and traced the spaces between her moles, finding the fleshly constellations and whispering the names of each one as he drew it with his fingers. A messily sketched W. Cassiopeia. A jagged diamond. Cepheus. A curved swoop that took up the whole of her shoulder blades. Draco.
He’d leaned down and planted a series of kisses on the inked image that lived on the small of her back. That nook almost no one else ever saw, that never met the sun. The stubble from his chin had grazed the pale skin there, the series of jagged black lines. He’d smiled when he’d first seen her tattoo. Those radio pulses, transmissions from a distant spinning star. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Rachel hated how famous it had become, hated anyone who wore the T-shirt. They were hers, those tortured wave forms that looked like a ragged heartbeat, a mythical mountain range. They’d meant the world to her when she was eighteen, years before tattoos in that spot were given derogatory connotations, years before jeans were worn so low the world could see the curve of a spine.
The thought of that night was both a balm and an irritant. It was tainted. Mark had memorised the names of the constellations and the shapes they formed. He had deliberately learned the dozens of ancient gods and creatures that shifted every day, entirely different from summer to winter. He’d learned them for a purpose. His fingers might have traced scores of backs, sketching the stars onto every one. Rachel’s eyes wouldn’t close.
When Rachel woke that Sunday morning, her WhatsApp icon bore a red circle. Her messages never came overnight. She clicked with barely woken fingers. It was from Tim – no words but a picture – a selfie of his face, smiling. He’d missed her calls the night before, the trills ringing into nowhere, four or five times before she gave up. This grinning snap was an apology.
Looking at him was always a jolt. The blond of his hair was growing redder with age, moving through auburn on its way to grey. In the weeks since he’d last been home, his stubble had grizzled to a near-beard. When they’d been young, he’d been known for his outdoorsy looks; white-tipped hair and sunburned cheekbones. His skin was sallow now, from too many hours at a screen. At every first glimpse, she registered him as old. Her eyes took seconds to accustom. Every three or four weeks, when he returned for the weekend, she’d be stunned, for a moment, at this middle-aged intruder. She wondered if his eyes went through the same shock.
The girls got ready in Mia’s room. Mia, Keira, Ella and Abby. Lily remained tangible in her absence. They left the door open, letting their voices fill the whole house. Rachel couldn’t face the farce of motherly pottering, so lay on the cool sheets of her bed. She could see them flit past the gap in her door; she could grasp the gist of what they were saying.
Ella had evidently convinced the others that a night out was far from inappropriate. Sam had corralled the parents. The request initially sent shockwaves. The mothers had messaged incessantly, debating whether cosseting them was the right approach. Sam made the case for the teenagers. It wasn’t reasonable to punish them for Lily’s choices. They deserved some fun; it had been a gruelling week for them all. Curfew had to be agreed upon. It only worked if they were all aligned. Ten was settled on for school nights and Sundays, eleven for Friday and Saturday. They were being fair. Rachel would rather have kept Mia at home, behind a locked door, all summer.
The girls turned iTunes up high, singing along with every trill of Taylor Swift. Keira’s misgivings appeared to have been put to one side.
Ella’s shouts rang through the house. ‘You look amazing!’
‘Shut up! I look like a thumb. You’re the gorgeous one.’
‘You’re idiotic. But at least you can dance.’
‘Tu es la Reine dansante!’ Keira deepened her voice to parody, making the others laugh.
Rachel couldn’t hear Mia’s voice. She didn’t join in with the others in their shrieks. Rachel couldn’t decipher her silence; it could be a spasm of distress, or mute horror at what she knew about her mother. Rachel had tracked every possible route by which Mia could have uncovered her secrets. She played them over in her mind, feeling for the cracks where the truth could have seeped out. Mia couldn’t know. The girls chimed together on the chorus, and surely Mia was singing too. It’s impossible to sing if you’re not happy. She couldn’t sing if she knew. They were still fifteen, and it was s
till summer. Sam was right about that.
To Rachel, their music was as sugar-coated as their perfume; peppy girls rhyming about heartbreak or friendship or the sort of empowerment that’s used to sell trainers. It seemed so tinny. Rachel closed her eyes against it. These girls were nudging sixteen but didn’t adore a single man with a guitar. At their age, Rachel’s whole firmament had been filled with heroes holding Gibson Les Pauls, Fenders. She used to pocket plectrums from the stage after gigs.
The process of getting ready took over an hour. The destination wasn’t even a club or party, but a park where they were meeting some boys. Despite the venue, the girls worked to create their faces from scratch. New eyelashes were glued on. Keep your mouth open, it stops you from blinking. Nails were put under heat until their colours were permanent. They brushed on sharper cheekbones, finer noses. They teased hair that had already been dyed using techniques Rachel had only heard of. Vernissage, balayage. When she was that age, hair hung in whatever frizz or lank sheet nature had cursed you with; now they could all have armloads of tousled waves. They had the means to look however they wanted, but they all chose to look the same. Only the colours of their hair differed. Rachel thought back to the clumped mascara and Heather Shimmer lipstick she’d glopped on in her teens, and felt a wave of gratitude that her aim then had been to look cool rather than beautiful.
When they were done, it was hard to tell one from another. Mia no longer looked like Rachel’s daughter; she no longer bore the stroppy pout her genes had gifted, or the eyes that always looked sleepy. Her face had been recarved to match that of her friends, any aberrant features contoured out with precise shadows and highlighter. Rachel wanted to grab a flannel and scrub it off, to get underneath and see her daughter’s real skin, her real bone structure, the tiny movements of her face that might give away what she was thinking.
With the girls gone, the house echoed. Rachel paced the full length of the building, from kitchen to living room, upstairs and to the corners of every bedroom. She felt caged. She tried to work instead of rest, laying books and papers on the kitchen table. Every evening was vital. Restrictions on set texts were grasping harder, and demands for lesson plans would weigh on her all summer. She should be making a dent in the stack of marking that had built up, but she couldn’t focus on those biroed words. After no more than fifteen minutes, she gave up. She needed to see where Mia was, how she was acting. She needed to see her daughter.
She packed supplies as if she was going on a road trip: a Tupperware container of fruit, a bottle of water that could sit in the cup holder. She practically tiptoed to the car, even though the girls would already have reached the park. She knew which stretch of green they had gone to. The roads were quiet, and Rachel killed her lights full minutes before she reached the destination. She knew where she could park the car to be able to see them. A thicket of trees hid the vehicle from sight. The dark was seeping in. It was the kind of summer dark that made you wait, but was all the lusher when it finally descended. If she was silent, if she turned the light of her phone face down, they would never know she was there.
They were exactly where she had expected. They were shrieking so loudly it was impossible to miss them, reaching the exact pitch that jabs the spine and makes eyes clench. They were gathered around a bench, facing the other direction. Rachel could see their hair glinting in the streetlamp above. The boys were apparently playing it cooler, leaving the girls to linger.
Rachel could see their mouths moving, but even with the window rolled down, the nuance of sound was lost in the air. Without words, it was easier to read them. Ella took her place at the front of every picture, made sure her laugh rose the highest. Keira contorted her body to emphasise her jokes. Abby rigged up her phone to play music and – as the boys emerged at the far side of the park – the girls danced.
They danced as if it was practised. They stood on the park bench and wove their bodies together. Their arms moved languidly, raised above their heads, undulating slowly as if they were in a dream or a memory, not a patch of scrub three hundred yards from a main road. Their hair looked as if the wind had styled it, not twenty minutes with a BaByliss. Maybe teenage girls always seem lyrical in the dusk, but Rachel couldn’t look away. Mia glowed.
Her bodycon dress ended halfway down her thighs. Rachel couldn’t fathom where those legs could have come from. No logical combination of her and Tim could have produced those limbs. It made her smug. Whatever decisions she’d made along the way must have been the right ones. Those little capsules of folic acid she’d swallowed so religiously during pregnancy must be packed full of whatever pixie dust makes legs gleam. She must have breastfed so magnificently, her milk so sweet and creamy, that when Mia had suckled, she’d gained a gloss that would never fade. She must have spooned just the right quantity of pureed butternut squash into her infant’s mouth for her to grow rich and golden. Through the tint of the windscreen glass, Mia looked to have the sort of insouciant beauty that usually indicates enormous wealth. She seemed to be in no distress. As she dropped to a sudden deep crouch, then slowly curled back up, Rachel felt outrageously proud.
In the dark of the car, hidden from their sight, Rachel allowed herself to relax. She eased each set of muscles. Yoga had given her the routine – feet then ankles then calves then thighs. She consciously softened each gripped tendon until her body slumped against the car’s seat. Her mind wouldn’t comply so readily, but cleared enough to let in a chink of light. She had spent so long not thinking of him. She’d blocked him out as best she could, but now he was all she could imagine. When she closed her eyes, Mark was all she could see. But his eyes were far away, and looking at someone else.
Suddenly, every muscle was tight again. The ferry they’d caught had gone to Dunkirk. It had been all over the news. But she knew him. He wouldn’t have gone north and settled over the border in some safe, unknown nook of Belgium. It wouldn’t suit him at all. She knew he was in France. She knew how his mind worked. He’d have wanted Paris. All his treasured cultural references took him there. The girl with brutally short hair and the Herald Tribune T-shirt, the students in the spring of ’68 with books in their back pockets and Molotov cocktails in their fists. Only Paris or New York would do. If New York had been nothing but a ferry ride away, he would have holed them up in Greenwich Village, eaten Chinese noodles from white cardboard cartons, and played Dylan on vinyl. But Paris was too crowded, too prominent. He’d need somewhere safer. Rachel knew exactly where they were.
In the months they’d spent together, they’d only gone away once. Mia had been invited to spend the weekend with Keira’s family, and Rachel persuaded Mark to take a trip. She’d booked the tickets and insisted. One weekend in the first French town she could get flights to. Rouen. They’d indulged in every cliché over those two days, revelling in the fact that no one knew their faces.
He would have gone back there. He needed to play safe, to hide, and he would choose somewhere he already knew, whose lines of sight were familiar, whose geography he wouldn’t have to pick up from scratch. His scientist’s mind could be deeply pragmatic. He’d select the same apartment; the same building, the same rooms. He’d want to control every variable. He’d have remembered the name and the number.
Rachel’s hands clutched the faux-leather of the car seat so tightly it hurt her fingers. Mark was in that town, just a few hours’ drive from the ferry port, with its cobbled streets and beautiful buildings. He was there with Lily. Rachel watched Mia dancing, watched her golden thighs flowing from side to side. She watched her daughter, who seemed unaware of her mother’s behaviour, of the danger that had crept so close to her. Mia knew nothing of the secret that could sever her family, that could rip away the security she’d been raised in. Mia flipped her hair, a darker blonde than her mother’s, over one shoulder. Rachel knew where Lily and Mark were, but she also knew there wasn’t a chance she’d tell.
Mark would have lifted her phone from her ha
nds as soon as the ferry began to move. Lily’s impulse would have been to grip it so hard he couldn’t wrench it free, but Rachel knew she’d have let it slip to him. Then she’d have watched, stunned, at the arc from his hand into the black water. He’d have kept his own turned on for a few more days.
A false wind would have whipped at her hair. The movement of the boat would have made it trail behind her, streaming into his face, as bright as a ribbon. He’d have wanted to stand on the deck, to watch the shore recede behind them. The throb of the engine would have trembled Lily’s legs from the feet up as the ferry moved away from the dock. Every second that passed would have moved her further away from anyone who knew her. She’d have felt a jolt, a flash, been seized by something close to panic. She’d have been primed to run inside, to clatter through those plastic chairs on that patterned carpet until she found a kind woman whose phone she could beg to borrow. She’d know her home phone number, her mum’s mobile, by heart, but it would take a few attempts before she’d be able to dial it, be able to sob down the line when it connected. But then, his arm around her, close and firm despite the heat. She’d have softened against him. With every sway of the boat she’d have known he was becoming hers.
The sun’s reflection on the water would have been startling. They’d have squinted to see, until the shore was just a line. Lily would have breathed it in, taking great gulps of air. There was no way back. The sea would have been the exact shade as the sky, and his lips would already taste of salt.
The message came on a slip of paper. An eager Year 7 with a thick fringe had trotted in during Monday-morning registration with the paper neatly folded, held in both of her hands. It was only one line, typed by Graham’s assistant and printed out. No greeting, just a demand. It jumped out to Rachel in jolts. Ten-thirty. Deputy head’s office. Police interview.
Rachel could hear her heels click as she walked down the corridor. Period-two lessons were underway, and it felt as if hers was the only body moving through the school. The dread of every student ever sent on that journey filled each one of her steps. The endless lengthening of the corridor, the weight of her legs, the lack of air. The numbness. At the end of that corridor were people who had the power to shatter every delicate thing she’d so diligently gathered. The relationships she’d nurtured. Both Tim and Mia could be lost. The knowledge that sat in the deputy head’s office could rip it all away. A handful of words from their mouths is all it would take. And it was Mia’s world they’d smash. The world Rachel had built for her. The world she’d never intended to put in peril. She couldn’t rob her daughter of that stability, couldn’t expose her to that pain. She couldn’t change the blueprint of Mia’s future relationships, hardwiring her for loss, teaching her that things end. She needed to preserve the purity. She needed to keep Mia close. She would do anything.
Heatstroke: an intoxicating story of obsession over one hot summer Page 13