‘The worst has already happened,’ she told her friend Carrie, as she threw back her head and let the stars shatter her face. ‘And that makes me freeeeee.’
They were drunk on a rooftop bar, with their hair streaming around them, full of power and possibility.
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ Carrie said. ‘That’s not how it works. One disaster doesn’t stop the others from lining up to take its place.’
Even so, Jess spent her college years convinced that she’d had all her bad luck in one clump. She raced down black runs, went home with risky men, drove fast.
But now she is fearful. She is afraid of having to face a truth she has trained herself to live without. She is afraid of pain and loss. Already, she is sure that the incident with Miles Rennie will have a sequel. And now there is this. She is not sure yet what to make of this.
She reads Ruby two rounds of Owl Babies, and as usual the mother owl comes home. Each time, Ruby squeals with delight, clapping her fat little hands. Except that tonight it is the wrong book for Jess, who can hardly keep the tears from her own eyes as she waits for Ruby’s to take on their clouded look, pre-sleep. Jess slaps all the shutters closed and waits there in the semi-dark for her to drift away. And as she watches Ruby nuzzle her way towards sleep, her heart clenches for her own lost mother. By now, the news is hurtling around inside her head. She tries Charlie’s phone, but it goes to voicemail. She didn’t think he had another client dinner, but she is never sure. She is bursting to talk to someone. She could ring Martha, but Martha has three toddlers to contend with. She could ring Sarah or Max, but she doesn’t want to bring this into the office, at least not yet. Contemplating the gleaming floor, the airy space of the room, she thinks of all those people who just disappear. The faces at the station, the people who stare out of ‘Missing’ posters. Do police routinely turn up to discuss someone who disappeared years before? She doesn’t think so.
She splits the last bagel and pops it in the toaster. It burns, even though she thought she’d checked the setting. Once she has scraped off the black and smeared the scarred surface with butter, she no longer feels like eating. She busies herself with the iron instead, swiping a damp piece of kitchen roll over the rusty residue that has attached itself to its leading edges, until she realises she has no idea where Hana keeps the ironing board.
And while all this is going on, or not going on, she is developing a theory. Immediately after Goa, press interest in the case gave the police a child-protection role – not too much hassle, no more attention than they could bear. They were assigned two young officers who tried to interest Ro in football. Jess told them it wasn’t his thing, but they wouldn’t listen. It was her thing, though – skills, stats, whatever. They told her she was marvellous to know so much, and about Stoke City, too. While she detected the condescension even then, she was grateful for the praise. And then someone else took over, a girl with lovely nails who staked her professional pride on making Sparrow better. There was no more football after that.
She realises then. The older policeman, the golfer, must be one of those officers from the old days. It softens her heart to think he cared enough to come along and break the news to her himself. She wishes she’d been kinder, less snippy. The fact that someone else still cares, it matters. She still cares too. She’s just not sure she can afford to.
And then there is Ro.
Sitting there in the shuttered room, on the polished floor that is still warm from the day’s sun, she listens to the baby monitor and the rise and fall of Ruby’s breath, the snuffle as she turns and the cot rattles and the little mobile above her head gives out the first two notes of its tune.
There is no place here for Ro.
The gate creaks open, then clacks shut. There are footsteps along the path, a shuffle at the letter box, a drop. When she goes to check, it’s just another flyer. Robert has sold another home on your road. And that’s how it is when the world shifts. Sometime in the velvet dark, she senses Charlie arrive, but it’s much too great a distance for her to clamber to the surface, and she can’t muster the energy to speak. As he undresses in the en suite, she catches a sliver of light, the whine of his toothbrush. In bed, he curls right up behind her and that reassures her, though she’s not sure why. He smells meaty, and she can feel the rasp of his stubble on her shoulder, his cock at the base of her spine. He folds his arms around her waist, and then they are both asleep.
4
At the Travelodge, Ro has taken another Ambien, and is just descending into a bout of Mags-defeating sleep when, in London, Jess is getting out of bed. She is standing at the double basin in the en suite, sawing at her teeth while Charlie takes a shower. Each moment that passes somehow makes the subject of the passport more difficult to raise. Reaching for a towel, he bends to kiss her. His breath tastes sour from the night before, and she turns her head away.
‘Sorry I was so late,’ he says. ‘Bloody client couldn’t get enough of me.’
She hasn’t the will to question him. As she watches him dress, sliding on smooth cotton, rolling back the cuffs and threading through the gold links she bought him out of last year’s bonus, she has a flash of him in an entirely different life, where the cotton is polyester and the shoes aren’t clean and the bathroom is shared with people he isn’t sleeping with. She tries to dress him in that other life, but her imagination fails her.
Breakfast is hurried, as it always is midweek. A thick yoghurt with a splodge of honey, a thimbleful of coffee. Ruby asks for ‘holiday’, as she has done every day since May, when they went to France, just the three of them, and walked with her on their backs for hours, taking turn and turn about. Being carried through the green by people who love her. This is holiday. But Jess needs to sit in a room and hold her head between her hands. She needs to decide whether to contact Ro, and how to do that even if she wants to. The very thought of what will come from Ro learning of the passport is exhausting. It frightens her too.
Charlie slides his cup out from under the coffee machine. He looks at her, then knocks the coffee back. ‘What is it, hun?’ he says.
She manages to speak calmly – the two men, the passport. She doesn’t say she thinks she recognised one of them because Charlie would pooh-pooh that. And she doesn’t mention Ro.
‘So, what are they saying?’
‘I suppose they’re not really saying anything. Not yet anyway. They just thought I should know, that’s all.’
‘Not very helpful, is it? We don’t have any answers but just in case you were managing to get on with your life, we thought we’d—’
‘Please don’t, Charlie.’
‘I’m not criticising you, Jess.’ He reaches out for her, but stays just out of range. ‘It’s just this mania for excavating everything when we all know there will never be any real answers. It pisses me off. So, there was a second passport. So what?’
She feels frozen, as though the emotion inside her has shut itself off for fear of being called out, named and shamed. She puts out her hand to lift the cup in front of her, but it doesn’t seem to want to obey. Perhaps something shows in her face though, because he launches himself towards her and she finds herself buried in his jacket, which smells of old rain.
‘Oh my love, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
She doesn’t cry, she merely notes that he doesn’t seem to grasp the significance of this at all. And then she begins to tell herself that his reaction is the right one – it means nothing. In the gleaming temple of efficiency that is her kitchen, it is difficult to conjure up a Goa beach, the confusion of being abandoned. It still seems impossible, the comprehensive loss of both parents. Not a scrap of evidence. Just the disbelief, the sudden void, the constant chatter of voices she didn’t understand, the fear that nothing would ever be safe again.
Charlie draws back from her and smooths down her hair. He kisses her cheek, a chirpy kind of kiss that is just not the right one to serve the moment. She remembers the sadness in the golfer policeman’
s eyes, and she knows he thought the passport mattered. She thinks it matters too. She wants to scream it out loud so that everyone can hear – she’s come back, she’s come back – but not here, not now.
‘I’m sorry, Jess. It’s not nothing. I know that. It’s just— We can’t keep doing this, can we? Theories, more theories.’ He bends down and kisses her head. ‘Let’s plan something nice for the weekend.’
‘Well I guess we have your birthday on Sunday, so that’s something.’
He misses the sarcasm in her voice. His face lights up. And she realises he’d forgotten it was his birthday, which must be a first. Charlie is like a kid when it comes to his birthday. Parties need to take place on the actual day. There must be candles. It’s one of the things she loves about him, this candour when it comes to his own pleasures. Somehow, it seems to make him generous, mindful of celebrations even when he’s not the centre of attention himself. He goes to Ruby, and nuzzles her face. ‘We haven’t had much time recently, have we, sweet pea? So, yep, a party will be nice.’
And for a moment she wishes she never had to leave this room. This is the kind of life she has striven to achieve, and it is doing its work now. It is making her feel safe. The smell of bitter coffee, the warmed sweet milk, the daughter rattling at the tray of her high chair with a plastic spoon.
Moments after Charlie shuts the front door behind him, Hana comes downstairs and the choreography they have devised begins, Hana distracting Ruby with her blue teddy to give Jess time to disappear without a fuss.
She stands all the way to Liverpool Street. In the crush of strivers fighting for the escalator, she grieves for all those days when she needed a mother. She runs a finger under her eyes to preserve her mascara, but the sadness is like a wave and it drowns her. She sits in a booth at the back of the Prêt on the corner and forces down a harsh espresso against the heave of tears. Now and then, someone glances at her. A girl in a pink mac looks her straight in the eye, then swirls the straw round in her smoothie and turns away. And maybe she looks like a mad person because no one asks if they can help, which they can’t anyway.
For a long time, she had been unable to remember anything about the day her parents vanished. It had been bleached out by light – the sun in her eyes on the beach, the blaze of naked bulbs in the police station afterwards. They said she must try harder to remember, but the glare obliterated everything. Once the questions stopped, and she was able to make a space for herself that didn’t involve a beach and a vanishing, hazy shapes began to form behind that memory of light until one day the outline of a tree emerged. It was the kind of tree they use in ads for things that smell of coconut. But Jess smelt mango, and she knew for certain then that somewhere beyond the light was the beach. It would begin to materialise just as her head hit the pillow. Each night, it seemed, she could see a little more. Soon she perceived a stretch of sand, a red bucket. That single dreadlocked tree became a row of perfect palms straining out towards the sea. She sensed movement in there, people. But no matter how hard she tried they stayed hidden. She swirls the dregs of coffee around the little paper cup and knocks it back.
When she enters the revolving doors of the offices, she glances up at the extravagant glass installation suspended from the top floor of the building. It seems even more inappropriate than ever today. Rope after rope of multicoloured baubles and tentacles and strange whimsical flourishes sweep through the central atrium from somewhere out of view all the way down to the entrance hall. The rest of the building is prim, dove grey and walnut, but this is a carnival of every wild imagining a lawyer needs to curb. It reminds her that she is beginning to hope, and she mustn’t do that.
She swipes an FT from the rack by the lift and scans the front page – another orange jumpsuit against another blue sky. The shocking cruelties are all still out there. And yet, today is not the same as yesterday, because her mother might not be dead. Then again, if Sophie is alive, she must have opted out of contact for all these years. Something hardens in Jess with that thought. Her mother is dead.
She takes a detour to the Ladies, locks herself into the first stall, and throws up the coffee in bitter little retches. Outside the cubicle, someone has come in to wash her hands. There is the clink of make-up, the muttered solo chat of someone who doesn’t realise they’re being overheard.
‘It’s not rocket science, for fuck’s sake. Jesus.’
Jess sits on in silence. She puts her head between her legs and waits for whoever it is to leave. When the door of the Ladies closes with a rubbery little kiss, she unlocks the door and starts to run through the immediate list of tasks. Review the distribution agreement before the ten o’clock meeting, deal with a pile of routine assignments and novations, correspondence with the department, check through the new production-sharing contract for Namibia. Normally, she doesn’t find these things daunting. She likes to put a form on things, to fence emotion behind verbal formulas. Her work is as important to her as her gleaming kitchen, her gravelled garden. She purchases a toothbrush, ready-pasted, from the dispenser that deals with every unexpected eventuality from a sexual opportunity to a ripped-off button. She fixes her make-up and goes.
The corridor is lined with all the new art that the young Spanish partner has bought on the firm’s behalf. His taste is provocative and nobody could believe he got the naked buttocks with the purple butt plug past the Acquisition Committee. By the time she reaches the central pod of PAs, she has pulled herself sufficiently together to be able to talk holidays, and whether you can ever really trust the reviews on TripAdvisor. But then it’s back to the swivel chair and the pile of documents that she must trawl through patiently enough to find the trap. There will always be a trap.
As far as she knows, Ro has never had a phone. Under his name she has stored six or seven numbers. There is Ro – Clare, Ro – Juliet, Ro – Saski, Ro – Pia, Ro – Fay. None of these relationships has lasted. None of these numbers is worth ringing. She’s done it before. It’s an embarrassment, that’s all. She tries to imagine how Ro lives, where he goes, what he does. She supposes the trust gives him enough to keep him above the poverty line, that whatever he has he still spends on travel, on the quest, but she doesn’t know.
She pushes back her chair and the half-finished mug of coffee she left down there earlier is spilled. She watches the brownish liquid bead onto the carpet tile, then soak into a heart-shaped stain. There was a stage when Ro would have seen that as a sign. Clouds, birds, an archipelago of freckles on a new face – everything was scanned for what it might have to say about the only thing that mattered.
The latest draft of the distribution agreement is printing off next to her. The smell of baked paper is overwhelming, and she wishes she could open the window. Better to let the summer in than to freeze-dry it, that’s what she told HR when D3 petitioned them for the keys to the windows.
‘You’ve a way with words,’ the woman said, as if that were suspect in a lawyer.
But in an office full of harassed perfectionists, the windows remained sealed.
The agreement is routine – she can already guess which will be the contested sections – it’s the clients who will be time-consuming. There will be egos to salve, losses to gloss over and pointless gains to be dressed up as stunning victories. Meanwhile, accumulating in a corner of her mind, the list of things still to be arranged for Charlie’s birthday party in a couple of days’ time. In another corner, Ro.
She sits side-on to the glass panel that looks onto the little cluster of PAs and beyond them to that carnival of coloured glass plunging through seven storeys of prime real estate, past Probate and Chancery and Estates and Private Client, through Commercial A and Commercial B.
A call comes in on the extension, which is unusual. Most clients call her direct line. The woman at the other end sounds confident, friendly even. She introduces herself briskly and, leaving no gap, she cuts to the chase.
‘I’m ringing to let you know that we’ll be running a story in the Daily Post.’<
br />
Jess has never even read the Daily Post.
‘We want to get to the bottom of the story of your mother’s disappearance, just as much as you do. The passport, it’s significant, I think.’
Having only just heard about the passport herself, Jess is shocked that anyone else has heard. Immediately, she thinks about the policemen. Which number did she give them? She can’t remember.
‘I was hoping for a quote, you know? About the whole experience?’
Whatever that is. She suspects she hasn’t had the whole experience yet. When Jess doesn’t say anything right away, the woman just keeps on talking, as if to pause would break a spell. ‘I’m sorry to have to disturb you at work. I know what it’s like, juggling, with Ruby still so young. Hard work.’
She is taken aback that this stranger, who has muscled in on her day, could know about Ruby. The woman seems more powerful now, and that makes Jess keen not to offend, not to make an enemy of someone who writes for the Daily Post. And then there is the client, who must not be kept waiting, and his agreement, which must be perfect.
‘Just a few words, Mrs Clark, that’s all I need.’
She can’t imagine that anyone at work reads a rag like that. What will it matter? And so, Jess tells the woman she can have her quote. She supplies a rehash of something she said to a missing-persons charity once, as far as she can remember it. Something a little grandiose about life and challenges and surmounting them. But as soon as she puts down the phone, she regrets it. She should have spoken to Ro first. And now it feels like she’s unlocked all the doors.
Running out of time before the meeting, she scans the numbers she has for Ro. Ro – Fay is the most recent entry, so she tries that one first. She has never met Fay, but all Ro’s women are tiny and blonde and surprisingly feisty, so maybe she doesn’t need to. Fay doesn’t recognise her name, but as soon as Jess starts to explain, she butts in.
The Orphans Page 5