The Day We Disappeared

by Lucy Robinson

  I couldn’t understand why someone like him would want to hire a scruffy, shy, dithering hippie like me, rather than some sleek blonde who ran a Power Spa in Chelsea.

  Stop it, you great big tit, I imagined Kate saying. Have some faith in yourself, woman!

  ‘I’m very flattered to have the Big Cheese come to meet me,’ I said, as we waited for the lift. Then I had a mild panic. ‘Oh, just to clarify, I meant Big Cheese as in Big Boss, not that I think you’re cheesy.’

  ‘Oh, I’m cheesy enough.’ He gestured me towards an opening lift door. ‘I’m worryingly cheesy. I own some dreadful music and still make Valentine cards for my granny, and I totally believe in flowers and mix tapes and boxes of Milk Tray. I mean, who even buys Milk Tray, these days? I’m a dead loss!’

  I hated lifts, but I couldn’t let Stephen know. I tried not to imagine the doors jamming closed and, of course, imagined just that.

  ‘There’s nothing naff about flowers and mix tapes and Milk Tray,’ I said, imagining us trapped in there and running out of oxygen. ‘I used to long for someone to give me that sort of stuff!’

  ‘But you stopped?’ We zoomed upwards.

  ‘No, I just …’ What? I’ve been single my whole life because I’m scared of men? I blushed. The lift came to a rapid halt and the doors slid noiselessly open. Phew.

  Stephen was smiling at me. ‘Well, if it’s a mix tape you want, you only have to ask,’ he said. ‘But please keep this grand fromagery to yourself. I’m running a multi-billion-pound business here.’ We turned to walk along a dazzling corridor, into which lights hung on invisible strings at different heights. London lazed around below us, a docile animal napping in the spring sun.

  Stephen took me into the Annie Kingdom and I gasped. Everything I’d asked for was there and more besides: the special heated table with extra-soft cushioning; the top-end waxes and oils I’d hardly dared request. Flowers and plants, a state-of-the-art music system and a sleek, shiny Mac in my little office next door. Plus a MacBook Air, just in case I found myself needing two computers at once. I certainly hadn’t asked for those. To top it off there was a big cake with my name on it and ‘WELCOME’ in slightly wobbly letters.

  ‘I made it myself,’ Stephen said. ‘So it’s quite bad. But it’s the thought that counts, hmm?’

  I stared and stared at him. The CEO of a company had made me a cake. Short of receiving a veg box from the prime minister, it couldn’t have been more surprising. ‘You – you made me a cake?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you I care about my employees?’ He grinned. He should have sounded naff, but he didn’t. Probably because he actually meant it. ‘It’s wheat-, sugar- and dairy-free, and because of that it tastes disgusting, but never mind. I’ve called a little welcome party for you at five p.m. so I’m sure you’ll persuade someone to eat it.’

  ‘How did you know?’ I felt I might cry. No man had ever been so nice to me. ‘How did you know I didn’t eat wheat or dairy or sugar?’

  ‘Because you’re a massage therapist and reiki practitioner and you smell of essential oils.’ He looked out of the window, smiling at some private thought, and I noticed the delicate skin by his eye, little veins, like rivers on a distant map. ‘And you wear tie-dye skirts. Of course you don’t eat wheat or dairy or sugar, Annie Mulholland.’

  Someone at FlintSpark had booked in my first two weeks of clients, and had very kindly given me the morning to ‘create my space’. I put out some towels, then went off to get my security pass, my ‘space’ duly created. Over the years I’d come to understand that feng shui was a bonus, nothing more. What really mattered was me and the client: my ability to sense the energy and rhythm of their body, and theirs to turn off the ceaseless noise in their heads. I’d had my best massage ever in a sweltering room off a stinking alleyway in Beijing, where only the hot domes of my eyelids had prevented me seeing cockroaches scuttling across the floor underneath me.

  Besides, the space was already stunning and didn’t need any help from me and my ‘design’ ideas. (Claudine said that my house was one of the greatest recorded crimes against good taste.)

  I used the rest of my morning to roam the extraordinary array of lounges, libraries, restaurants and games rooms at the FlintSpark ‘offices’. How did anyone get any work done? It was like being at a festival! There were thick jungly carpets, ornate Chinese tables, beautiful industrial light fittings. The gym – or, at least, the tiny corner of it that I could see from the door – had been kitted out to look like it was in outer space. If I wanted to, I could bench-press underneath Jupiter or do some stretching on the mats beside a troop of naughty aliens.

  The aliens made me smile because I somehow knew that Stephen had chosen them. I imagined those eyes twinkling mischievously as he explained his idea to a baffled designer and felt a little scrunch of pleasure in my stomach.

  Of course, it was the restaurants that excited me most. Free food! Unlimited free food! I got some granola and yogurt and a crisp fresh pastry, then felt so guilty about Stephen’s free-from cake that I took them back and got a smoothie with spirulina in it instead, trying not to mind too much.

  ‘I think it’s more about brand storytelling,’ a man with round glasses and a beard was saying at the other side of my table. He was talking to another man with round glasses and a beard.

  Beard Man II forked a piece of crayfish into his mouth and had a think. ‘Agreed. But until we’ve run a deep dive on it, I think we should be cautious.’

  Jesus Christ.

  Much to my delight, when I left the restaurant I bumped into Jamilla. Jamilla had worked in the building next door to Claudine and me when we’d set up our practice. She was now FlintSpark’s chief wellbeing adviser and the reason why Stephen had booked a massage in the first place. ‘Hey!’ I hissed. I didn’t feel important enough to raise my voice in a place like this. ‘Jamilla!’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she said, wearing a glazed, distracted sort of look. I asked her how she was but received only the vaguest indication that she was well.

  I frowned. This was not how I remembered her. Did she not want me working here? Had she gone off me? ‘Look, let’s catch up later,’ she said, noticing my face. ‘Sorry, I’m just, er …’

  I let her be. Wellness coaches were allowed bad days. I spent fifteen minutes trying to find the Annie Kingdom again, before realizing that I was on the wrong floor.

  When I finally found it a workman was just finishing up after hanging a large sign above the door saying ‘Inner Peace’ with a big retro arrow pointing downwards. It was surrounded by Hollywood bulbs and it made me disproportionately happy, as did a huge bunch of flowers with my name on it, then some lovely welcoming emails from HR and other people whose job titles I didn’t understand. The sky had rolled itself into great pillows of grey and my rooms, which seemed almost to hover in this humid cloudscape, were like a cheerful mezzanine-level entrance to heaven. I pressed my nose against the cool plate glass and wondered what the Annie Mulholland of ten years ago would have made of this.

  Probably not much. But twenty-two-year-old Annie, for all her hippie leanings and rejection of Western values, had spent a lot of her time in therapy because she was unhappy about most things. Right now – here in this moment, with my breath forming hot discs of condensation on the window – I felt I might be about to get a stab at feeling normal.

  My first appointment was at one thirty, and I’d been promised that a list of names would be left in my little office by midday. Thus far, nothing had appeared and it was one twenty-five.

  ‘We left it on the desk,’ said the girl whose number I’d been given as a contact. ‘Next to your computer?’

  ‘Oh, God. I’m so sorry. I threw away one of the computer manuals because there were two identical ones … I must have binned the client list too. Goodness, what a bad start …’

  I scrabbled around in my bin for the schedule but found nothing. One of those efficient ninja cleaners had been in already.

  I was crouching over th
e empty bin when Stephen Flint walked in.

  ‘Oh. Do you normally wait for clients under your desk?’

  I stuck my head out. My hair had already started to come out of its plait and was falling all over my face. ‘Actually, I do. It’s an ancient shamanic ritual.’ Instantly, I blushed. I’d just made a joke! At a man!

  Stephen laughed. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine. I threw out my client list for the afternoon. But the cleaner’s taken it already. I’m sorry, Stephen, I’m not normally such a shambles.’

  Barefaced lie. I had to get better at this stuff. I had to.

  Stephen was unfazed. He offered a warm hand to help me out from under the desk. ‘Well, you needn’t worry too much. Your first client is me. I called shotgun.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Suddenly – shockingly – the thought of running my hands along Stephen’s back had become thrilling.

  Boundaries, I told myself sharply. ‘Good for you,’ I said, jogging off to the treatment room so he wouldn’t notice the red in my cheeks. ‘I’m sure Jamilla’ll be very happy with you.’

  Stephen grinned. ‘She’s never happy with me.’

  There was a blanket of tiny freckles all along Stephen’s shoulders and, as he breathed in and out, I imagined them filling my hands, like warm little pebbles. He was more knotted than before, and had a large spasm in his lumbar region. I thought about what he’d said, about having had a really shitty year, and wished I could give him a hug. I knew all about that sort of year.

  I pressed my entire weight down into my interlaced palms, feeling his muscles release, stretch out, relax. I loved every minute of his hour: me, him, the gentle rhythm of breath and the clouds trundling slowly past.

  Massage had been my only constant since I’d crashed out of school, wrecked and hopeless, with only four GCSEs to my name. Without massage, and the respite it brought me from a head that felt like it would never heal, I was quite sure I wouldn’t have survived.

  Up, along, round. Up, along, round. I started on his bunched trapezius and found myself staring fondly at the soft hairs on the back of his neck.

  Careful, I warned myself.

  I’d learned massage in places where the focus was on chakras and biorhythms, rather than things like ethics, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t clear where the line was.

  Although what was I worried might happen? Stephen was almost certainly married. And, if not, he’d be in a relationship with a dynamic woman. And, if not, he’d never be interested in –

  STOP IT, YOU TIT, I imagined Kate snapping. Stop wallowing around in the Bad Shit!

  A tiny slice of pale blue eye opened as I tiptoed out to leave Stephen to dress. ‘You’ve ruined me,’ he moaned. ‘Help …’

  I sat at my desk, waiting for him to change, and grinned like a teenager. I loved having this effect on my clients, but I particularly loved having it on Stephen Flint.

  He texted me at eleven thirty-seven p.m.

  I was in the bath, poking a finger into my belly button and thinking again about Kate, whose phone had been switched off when I tried her. A tiny part of me was worried, even though Kate was made of tougher stuff than I and was, no doubt, fine. Knowing her, she’d have taken a sabbatical and gone to build a school in Venezuela or somewhere. It was just slightly odd that she’d not told me: during the course of our close eight-year friendship we’d never gone longer than a week without talking.

  I was thinking also about the stupendous evening I’d had. During my welcome drinks, Stephen’s PA, Tash, had told me that I was invited to a secret gig taking place in the music venue in the basement. Expecting some beardy bloke singing rubbish folk music, I’d been fairly astounded to see Elton John wander in. He’d done six songs, then left the room in a state of pandemonium.

  ‘This is UNREAL!’ I shouted in Stephen’s ear, when he appeared halfway through Elton’s performance. ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING!’

  Stephen was clearly very pleased. ‘This is how we roll.’ He touched my shoulder briefly. ‘Wonderful to see you smiling,’ he said, then turned to talk to Jamilla, who seemed perkier now. She’d told me earlier she’d not been in touch with Claudine for a while, and I thought, privately, that I didn’t blame her. Claudine was teetering on the brink of downright offensive at the moment. Last week she had told me that if I was entertaining notions of a crush on my boss I was being a deluded child. ‘Don’t be stupid, just for once,’ she had said. ‘Men like him are bad news. And they never go for women like you.’

  Thanks, I’d thought. Thanks a lot. I wondered if Claudine would be so bloody rude if she actually met Stephen and saw for herself that he was just a really nice bloke.

  Beside me in the crowd, Jamilla was listening to Stephen with a slight smile on her face. In spite of her improved mood she still seemed shattered. Stephen patted her back kindly before wandering off. I loved that he made an effort to talk to everyone, no matter what rank they held.

  I’d floated home on my bike, boggled and delighted. My world, I saw, had become very small over the last few years. My time had been divided between the tube, silent treatment rooms and exhausted, dreamless sleep. I’d lost the energy and courage that had once flung me across Asia with a rucksack on my back, and I’d kind of lost the ability to interact with other humans, which wasn’t good. But suddenly, gloriously, I could see the sky again.

  When my phone beeped from my bedroom, even though there was no reason on earth why he would be texting me – especially at this time of night – I somehow knew it was Stephen.

  I lasted sixty seconds before I heaved myself out of the bath to go and look.

  I’m so pleased you’re working for us. You are a dream! Everyone’s raving about you already! X

  Do I reply? I wondered. Certainly, said my furiously texting thumb.

  You’re welcome!! Thanks for taking me on board!!

  Too many exclamation marks.

  As his reply arrived in my inbox my excitement turned to something I wasn’t so familiar with.

  After my massage today I realized I really wanted to get well. Learn how to relax, eat healthily. All the things Jamilla keeps telling me to do. But it was you and your wonderful work that convinced me it’s time for a change. Thanks again, Annie. x

  I took the phone to bed and popped it on a Japanese silk cushion, as if it were a sacred object.

  ‘PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER,’ I whispered fiercely into the empty room. ‘HE’S YOUR BOSS.’

  But I couldn’t. I had never been able to let my guard down with strangers, especially men. Yet with Stephen Flint my guard had vanished into thin air. It was April; it was spring. Maybe today really had been the first day of the rest of my life.

  Chapter Six

  Kate

  Six thirty a.m., a Tuesday in April. A lone girl walks through an empty landscape at daybreak. Around her is a web of fine white lace, a million tiny pearls of water scooped up from the English Channel and carried high over Exmoor before settling in the fields. Her footsteps follow the line of the hedge, which is stuffed with blackthorn flowers and early-morning bumblebees already hard at work. Every few paces she turns and looks at the little footsteps she’s left, as if to check she is still alone. She listens, straining to hear something, but all that’s audible is a steady drip, drip, drip from the little coppice of beech trees behind her. Up ahead a tired light appears in the window of the old stone farmhouse and she walks on towards it, both relieved and disappointed that her solitude is to be broken.

  Sometimes I did that. Pictured myself as if I were in a film script: a lone woman picking her way through an empty landscape, checking every few steps for predators. It was the sort of thing that only the maddest article would do, probably, but it kept me on my toes. ‘Never forget the man in your shadow,’ I muttered to myself, sliding into the yard without setting off the squeaky gate that Sandra kept forgetting to oil. ‘Never forget that some aul’ bastard could pop out and grab you any time, Kate Brady …’

 
I giggled. I sounded like an old man in a shebeen somewhere in the wilds of Connemara, not an ex-Google employee from Dublin who’d run off to hide with the horses. Which was a good thing, because Joe said I was already beginning to sound English. ‘The shame of it, Galway,’ he’d tutted.

  I inhaled deeply as the smells of the yard snaked in. Thank God for this place. Here all I had to think about was whether the water buckets were full; whether I’d cleaned the right tack for Mark tomorrow; whether we were running low on haylage or chaff. Becca had been right: I had learned quickly, and that was because here in this remote corner of Somerset there was peace and simplicity, absolute freedom from the incessant noise of my old life.

  An early starling was watching me from the dovecote, but apart from that, the yard seemed empty; most of the horses would still be lying down in their stables. I felt a great swell of affection for my beautiful new friends, stretched out on their beds, trusting that soon people would appear to feed, exercise and love them just as they did every day, come hell or high water. They were so trusting, those creatures, so gentle. One in particular.

  In the far corner of the courtyard, a handsome white head was already hanging over the stable door. Stumpy made a quiet whickering sound as I approached him, his satellite-dish ears strained far forwards and his eyes focused excitedly on me.

  ‘Hello, silly,’ I said quietly, reaching into my pocket for the pieces of carrot he knew I was carrying.

  ‘Hoo-hoo-ho-hoo,’ he whispered, and – just as I did every morning – I smiled like a little girl. I was completely in love. Hooked. Done for.

  ‘Oh, you are just so lovely,’ I said, and kissed his nose. He butted me gently, impatient for the carrot. Food before love, he was saying. Come on, Kate Brady, you know my priorities.

  I gave him some carrot, then scratched underneath his forelock, smiling as his big head drooped and his eyelids closed. ‘I love you, Stumpy,’ I said. ‘I think you’re the nicest person I’ve ever met. I wish you were a man. Actually I don’t. Men are horrible! But you, my boy, are perfect.’