by Darren Young
‘Good times,’ the Australian said, nodding.
‘Mmm.’
‘Pity you haven’t still got your flat.’
He laughed and winked, his way of pretending he was just having a joke with her, but Laura knew him a little better than that and he had never been as subtle as he thought he was. But she wasn’t offended. There was enough history between them for neither to be embarrassed. She wasn’t the girl on campus he could just meet up with for sex any more, but she was still single and still very attracted to him.
‘I only live ten minutes away,’ she said. ‘If you don’t have plans.’
‘Didn’t you say you lived with your folks?’
She felt her cheeks get hot. ‘Yes. But I have my own room and everything.’
Brian laughed.
She took his hand as a taxi pulled up at the kerb and they jumped in and took the short journey to her house, his hand gently squeezing her thigh for the entire journey.
The cul-de-sac was dark and silent, with just the orange light from the street-lamp in the distance showing them where to go once the taxi had pulled away. It was nearly one o’clock, and Laura giggled nervously as she walked down the drive and found her keys and tried, several times, to put them into the door. Then she took Brian’s hand again and led him into the hall.
‘Laura?’
A light came on and her father was standing at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas.
‘Dad!’
She instinctively let go of Brian’s hand.
‘I thought I heard someone,’ Robert said, rubbing his eyes but not fooling his daughter one bit. She knew he had been awake all the time, waiting for her to get back, probably watching out of the window, she thought. He didn’t look very impressed.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘I was just nodding off.’ He smiled as he walked down the stairs still looking sceptically at the boy with her. ‘Are you going to … ?’
Laura took a second to register what he meant.
‘Sorry, this is … er, Brian. A friend from uni. I told you about him, remember?’
She knew she almost certainly hadn’t, but it sounded better that they shared a past, and her father didn’t know, or need to know, that the past they shared had only fulfilled one basic need.
Robert eyed the tall Aussie up and down and held out his hand. Her father was at least four inches shorter and two stone lighter, but she could have sworn she saw Brian take a tiny backward step, and for the first time it seemed the charm and right words had momentarily escaped him.
‘Well, Brian,’ he said as they shook hands, ‘thank you for getting Laura home safely.’
‘No bother, Mr Grainger.’ Brian nodded and smiled, glancing at Laura, who half-smiled back; both had quickly established that their brief reacquaintance was over.
‘Goodnight, Brian,’ her father said.
‘Night,’ said the Aussie with a nod, and closed the door behind him.
Robert looked at his daughter. ‘He seemed nice.’
Laura nodded and watched as her father walked back up the stairs.
‘Night, love,’ he said at the top.
‘Night, Dad,’ she said, and followed him up.
Part Two
The day after she was taken…
It felt as if I was waking up with a hangover after a heavy night.
I opened my eyes; the room was hazy, sun creeping in through the gaps in the Venetian blinds and laying pencil-thin lines across the duvet with laser precision.
There was a split second – maybe not even that long – when it felt as though it might have just been a dream. A weird, warped dream, so vivid and intense, but a dream nevertheless; all I had to do was wake up from it. But I was already awake, and the realisation of the awful truth quickly found its way to the forefront of my consciousness.
We had done it.
It was real.
I opened my eyes fully and looked at the alarm clock. It was a few minutes before six o’clock and, outside, it looked as if another gloriously sunny day was in store, but inside our bedroom it was bleak, as though we had our own little black cloud, just for us. It wasn’t hard to see a storm was brewing, somewhere off in the distance but moving towards us; a storm that I knew was only going to get worse and from which there was no escape.
I let my eyes close for a moment and saw them, those two shell-shocked parents on that beach, wandering around with jerky movements, turning this way and that, as if they were lost, and with not a clue which way to turn next – but all the roads led nowhere anyway.
I quickly opened my eyes again.
We’d barely slept. My wife had tossed and turned through the night; I couldn’t say if she’d managed to drift off for even a second but she hadn’t cried any more and that was something, although it may have been because she’d run out of tears at that point. When we’d put the child in a makeshift bed in a hastily arranged spare room, she’d stayed with her for twenty minutes, stroking her hair and humming softly until she went to sleep.
The child.
That was what she was at that moment. Little more than a commodity; like one of those dolls you could pick up from the shop on the promenade for £4.99. She didn’t even have a name, let alone an identity. Yet even without them, even as a commodity, she had fixed the damage to my wife that had until now seemed irreparable, and in that alone she had already achieved something I’d not been able to do.
Did my wife even know it yet? Did she feel as if she was no longer broken? I rolled over to her side of the bed to face her.
She wasn’t there.
I got up, worried at first and then not; it was so obvious and I knew exactly where she’d be, so I tiptoed across the bedroom and on to the landing and put my head slowly around the half-open door of the next bedroom, a spare room that wasn’t spare any more.
She was lying in that tiny bed, fast asleep, all curled up so that her legs didn’t protrude from the end. In front of her, also asleep, was the little girl; their breathing in unison, my wife’s arm wrapped over her, keeping the bedcovers in place. The sun was creeping into this room too, and lit up their faces.
That image, on its own, made it worth the risk; even though I knew there was every chance we wouldn’t make it. I suspected that one day – maybe the next day, next week, maybe years down the line – a misplaced word could bring it all crashing down on our heads. I knew that one day someone might ask the wrong question – or the right one, depending on your perspective – at the wrong time and we’d have nowhere to go and this little girl might learn the terrible truth about us.
But that was for another day.
That child became more real then and no longer a £4.99 doll. She became this beautiful thing that would glue everything back together and make the future very different from the one I’d foreseen less than twenty-four hours earlier.
I took one last look at them and left them to sleep. My wife, without even knowing it, looked happy again, not broken any more; and, for me, it was the moment I knew I’d made the right decision not to call the police.
There was no longer any doubt in my mind.
That child was ours now.
That next day, I found myself lying in a strange bed.
There was a tiny moment among all the sleeplessness and crying when I must have drifted off through sheer exhaustion, and I awoke with a start and with the briefest, and cruellest, sliver of hope that it might have all been a really bad dream, and not real.
One look outside reminded me it was very real. At least a dozen vans and cars belonging to television news outlets were parked up on the seafront hotel car park; and I remembered they’d put us up there so we could be close to the beach in case she turned up.
Having hardly slept, instead watching a seemingly endless loop on the local news until the early hours of the morning, I started that next day with a thunderous headache, a sore throat that let out barely more than a pathetic croak, and the horrible sensation tha
t millions of pairs of eyes were looking at me, even when I was alone.
Todd was no help at all. He said he was sure that, if she had been taken, whoever did it would come to their senses and bring her back. ‘You don’t just steal a child!’ he kept saying – but then, he didn’t really think she had been taken. Not by a person anyway. He was sure it was the water that had taken her, and I knew that because, every time he said her name, he would instinctively look in the direction of the sea. I wanted to punch him when he did that, and when he sat feeling sorry for himself and asked if he could have been a better father and I wanted desperately to tell him yes, he could have been. If only he’d spent as much time with his kids as he had under those bloody cars, or if only he’d been as interested in what Jessica was doing as he was in those bloody sports pages.
Then maybe they wouldn’t have to be looking for her.
The police liaison officer was even less helpful. ‘No stone will be left unturned’ was her go-to line, but all I could see were divers scouring the water and people combing the beach for clues, and, when I asked if they were knocking on doors and stopping cars, she just reverted to her default position. I was so angry, yet I couldn’t make them understand.
Looking back, I should have been more rational – spoken to someone higher up the chain – but instead I let them convince me that they knew best, knew better than a mother and her maternal instincts, and I stood by and watched it unfold right in front of me.
The only person I shouted at, quite ridiculously, was my son, Stuart, as if an eight-year-old could be responsible for what had happened – but that didn’t stop me. Why hadn’t he been looking out for his sister? Why hadn’t he told us she wasn’t with him?
Why this? Why that?
I was just looking for someone to blame, and he was the easiest of the targets available to me. And my asking why was just to give me a break from all the if onlys. You see, the hardest thing, in those moments when the whole world is spinning around you and you just want to find the button to press stop and get off, is the feeling that it could all have been avoided if you’d just done things differently.
If only I’d not read that magazine. If only I’d taken her to get an ice-cream. If only I’d not taken my eye off her. If only I’d seen which direction she was headed. If only we hadn’t decided to go to the beach. If only it had been raining. If only we’d been happy with one child.
But the distraction of blame wasn’t masking the sense of inevitability that I felt so strongly. There was an indelible conclusion that Todd, the police liaison officer and probably everyone else had already reached at that point, but just wouldn’t say to my face, probably for fear of breaking me completely.
My daughter wasn’t coming back.
11 | Danni
Danni wasn’t making any headway with her father.
A week had passed since the funeral, a week Thomas had spent cocooned in his study, carefully avoiding her by keeping irregular mealtimes and pretending he was busy or that he hadn’t heard her. Rather than fight him, she was waiting for him to come round in his own time, although she hoped he’d hurry up.
By contrast, Danni herself was coping better than she expected.
She wasn’t sleeping well – her dreams kept waking her in the early hours and leaving her mind scrambled – but she had managed to go back to work the day after the funeral. She manned the reception desk at the dental practice that her family had used since she was five years old, and, when she got home each evening at twenty past five, she cooked and left a meal outside the study door and then did some housework. It had quickly become a ritual – a new one for her because her mother had always insisted on taking care of everything, but one that kept her suitably focused, and distracted.
It also took up most of her time. Although her father was virtually invisible, she didn’t like to leave him, so she stayed at home any time she wasn’t at work. She had never had a very busy social life, but even the one she did have had gone out of the window, and she hadn’t seen anyone outside of work since the funeral, including her best friend. They had spoken a few times on the phone, and she had made excuses about having so much to sort out and looking after her father, but eventually she had let slip that everything felt as though it was on hold until she was confident of leaving him on his own. The following evening there was a knock at the door, and minutes later the two friends were sharing a bottle of wine.
‘You didn’t need to do this,’ Danni had protested at the door.
‘You need it,’ her friend had said, and brushed past her.
Samantha Newbold was Danni’s oldest friend, the only friendship that had lasted beyond the secondary school where they had been inseparable. Now Sam was a supervisor at her uncle’s footwear company in the next town, and she had remained a loyal and dependable friend, and they always turned to each other in times of trouble – times like this. Sam had been a rock in the days before the funeral and also during it, and Danni felt guilty for not seeing her since.
‘I’m here, trying to move forward, and he’s dragging me back down all the time.’ Danni used her hand to demonstrate.
‘It must be hard for him, but he is an adult.’
Danni wasn’t in the least bit surprised by her friend’s less sympathetic stance. Sam was a straight-talker who rarely minced her words. Danni had always teased her that she never used any sentences where the word count reached double figures, and she had often thought that, if they hadn’t been friends from an early age, she would probably have been intimidated by Sam and found her too abrupt. It was only by knowing Sam so well that she realised she simply had an old head on very young shoulders. She was also physically intimidating at almost six feet tall – height she inherited from her Canadian father – and strikingly beautiful like her West Indian mother.
They had become friends when they were eight, plonked together by a teacher at primary school and quickly forming a bond, but Danni had always been in Sam’s slipstream as she catapulted through life taking any obstacle in her stride. She was the tallest girl in their year, captained the netball team – while Danni was usually reserve and carried the drinks – and represented the county at several sports; she was never, ever pushed around by anyone. But she never let anyone push her friend around either, and Danni grew accustomed to, and even comfortable with, being in her shadow. As they got older, Sam had been the first girl in their year group to have a proper boyfriend, and the first one to get a job when they left school.
Her maturity played a big part in this. Although now only twenty-three, she spoke like someone who could pass for twice that age. But she’d had no choice but to grow up quickly: she’d endured a turbulent home life, and her parents’ volatile relationship, until her father had left home. Danni often wondered how she’d have coped if their lives were somehow switched, and always reached the conclusion that she probably wouldn’t have. It had made Sam very wary of people, though, especially men, and Danni knew that was why she was giving her father very little slack.
‘You can’t always be here for him. You have your life too.’
‘I’m worried he’s having a breakdown and doesn’t know it,’ Danni said.
‘He’s just grieving, Dan. And he’s stronger than you think.’
They continued talking but they kept arriving back at the same place: it was something for her father, and not Danni, to resolve – and he would, Sam insisted, but in his own time.
‘I just feel guilty that I’m not in the same place he is.’
‘Is that where you want to be?’
‘No.’
‘Is that where your mum would want you to be?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So enough guilt, then.’
It sounded like an order and Danni realised it probably was one. Sam didn’t let her mope, and she knew her mother wouldn’t want to see her doing that either; she would have expected her to move forward. She’d always been that kind of person, one who dusted herself down and got on wit
h things.
‘Shall I open another bottle?’ Danni asked, but her friend shook her head and told her she had a meeting in the morning and it was expected that she would say something about next month’s sales targets.
‘With a hangover, I don’t think I’d do it justice,’ she laughed, and they had a black coffee instead before Danni walked her home, a short journey of less than half a mile to the next estate, even though Sam kept insisting she could walk alone.
‘I need some air,’ Danni told her. ‘So stop bitchin’.’ She laughed and gave Sam a gentle shove. She liked being the only person Sam let into her inner sanctum, beneath the strong veneer and hardened shell. She decided to tell her everything that had happened after the funeral.
‘He took advantage of you.’
Danni had to work hard to persuade Sam that it hadn’t been like that and that she’d instigated it as much as Euan had, if not more.
‘You weren’t thinking straight.’
‘I knew what I was doing,’ Danni assured her. ‘Besides, it was a one-off.’
‘Does he know that?’
Danni had always kept Sam fully in the loop about Euan’s behaviour when they split, and had showed her the messages he’d sent.
‘He’ll have to.’
‘Does your dad know he stayed the night?’
‘God, no. But these days I could have a whole roomful of men in there with me and he’d not notice.’
‘I’m shocked enough that you had one!’ Sam laughed as they reached the house.
‘I just want to talk to him. Dad, I mean, not Euan.’
‘Then find something to talk about. Work, for instance.’
‘I don’t want to talk about work.’
‘And he doesn’t want to talk about your mum. Work is a neutral subject.’
‘It’s also a boring one.’
‘So say you have a problem you need help with.’