The Day We Disappeared

by Lucy Robinson

That was assuming Stephen was even from West Sussex.

  Another day I’d done a sweet little blog about how desperately I’d longed for a boyfriend when I was a teenager. How I dreamed of a man who’d send me flowers and Milk Tray and mix tapes. Stephen had repeated that verbatim the day I started at FlintSpark! And the piece I’d written about the Counter at Hackney Wick, how Tim and I loved to go there for breakfast. Who had we found wandering the towpath outside?

  Jesus.

  Then had come the sadder, even more repugnant discovery that Stephen had found and plundered my dad’s blog too. He’d even befriended him on Facebook, and sweet, lovely Dad had just accepted the request. It made me blind with rage to think of Stephen infiltrating and infecting my father, just at the time that Dad had turned a corner and started trying to engage with the world again.

  All that stuff Stephen had known, he’d stolen from Dad’s Facebook page and blog: Dad’s love of Rioja wine and Borges the writer; Lizzy’s name, Le Cloob’s name; my announcement, aged twenty-one, that I was going gluten-,sugar- and dairy-free (and had been hopeless at sticking to ever since). It was all there. Every time Stephen had dropped one of those little nuggets of information into the conversation, he’d convinced me I’d told him myself.

  The dropped phone calls whenever I’d visited Dad, too. Of course they weren’t Dad’s new girlfriend. What sort of middle-aged woman would put the phone down just because her boyfriend’s grown-up daughter happened to answer the phone? No, of course it had been Stephen. The predator, just checking in on his prey. Taking a little risk, having some fun.

  The worst thing about all of these risks that Stephen had taken, however, was that they had all paid off. I’d heard only the things I’d wanted to hear and interpreted everything the way I’d wanted to. It was funny how your mind could do that. Hi, Annie, here’s sign after sign that your man is crazy, but because you like him I’ll make every sign invisible. How’s that, eh?

  The little girl and her brother left the café with their mother and the girl turned to wave at me again. Don’t leave me, I thought. Don’t go.

  They went.

  I pushed my coffee to one side. Any more stimulation and I’d take off through the roof, lost for ever in the hot smog of Abu Dhabi city.

  Poor, deluded me. I’d thought I’d been in love: deep, cartwheeling love; the kind of love I’d barely allowed myself to dream of. But it turned out that I was not. Dear Annie, We regret to inform you that, due to unforeseen circumstances, you are not in fact in love. As you will gather from the enclosed literature, you are instead in a ‘psychopathic bond’.

  How much longer would it have gone on, I wondered, if Claudine hadn’t found him out? How much longer until he started abusing me openly, rather than behind my back? And how could someone like me, who was so endemically terrified of men, have let it happen?

  ‘Stop it,’ I said quietly to myself. It had happened because Stephen had decided to go after me, and that was that. Nobody, not even a highly anxious and paranoid woman like me, would have questioned someone as humble, as self-deprecating, as all-round lovely as the Stephen Flint laid out in front of me. And look at Claudine! Look how she had been fooled by Sylvester!

  Poor Claudine. After we’d found Stephen in my back garden, and I’d had a panic attack, and Tim had called the police, and I’d had to answer endless questions and eventually begged to be allowed to go home, and pleaded with Tim to prescribe something to calm me down, we’d all convened at Lizzy’s house. I’d been so horrified by everything that had happened that I’d implored Le Cloob not to make me talk about it. Instead I’d spent most of the evening watching Tim and Lizzy, and asking Claudine what in God’s name was going on with her marriage.

  The answer had been shocking.

  ‘I ’ate Sylvester,’ Claudine had said in a tiny voice. ‘He is a fat, lazy slob and ’e treats me like his slave. I ’ave earned all the money in that ’ouse for the last five years. He is involved in some stupid sex cult, which pretends to be some sort of therapeutic community. They make out that it is all about “awakening” and “dealing with trauma” and …’ her slim, manicured hand was shaking ‘… and yet it is nothing more than a group of unwell people fucking each other and using words like “spiritual” to excuse themselves. Sylvester defends it to the ’ilt. He says I do not understand. He says terrible things to me, frequently. ’E would never ’it me but he ’as abused me for years. I am deeply miserable.’

  She had clasped her hands until her knuckles were sad white points. ‘And I am a stupid, proud woman, as you know, so rather than talk to my friends, I sign myself up for some dating.’

  Lizzy had smiled sympathetically. ‘That sounds like my kind of solution,’ she said. And I’d watched Tim flinch.

  Stephen, she told me, had asked her out on an internet site a few days before I had met him. She had instantly disliked his profile. ‘He called himself LeaderOfPeople,’ she said disparagingly. ‘I mean, come on.’

  He was still online after he and I had started going out, so she had emailed him, making clear she was a friend of mine, and asking what the hell he was doing. He had replied a few days later to say that he’d thought he’d cancelled the account and hadn’t logged on in weeks. His account had been deleted the same day so she had given him the benefit of the doubt. But recently she had joined another site, after Sylvester had gone off for one of his sex ‘retreats’, and, not recognizing her from her photo – she had again tried to keep her identity fairly hidden – Stephen had emailed her once more asking her out.

  Stephen had actually been pestering Claudine for a date on New Year’s Eve, while dealing with all of the shit at his New York office.

  It was mindblowing. ‘We were both taken in,’ she had said softly. ‘And this does not make us stupid women. Well, it makes me a stupid woman, because I ’ave not yet left my ’usband. But I will. I need time.’

  Claudine was not stupid. Neither was I.

  I scanned the terminal again, wondering how much longer I had. People continued to swarm past, pulling trolley bags, dragging children, checking phones, scanning departure boards. The coffee shop was playing Paul Weller now. My hands had stopped shaking; they looked shrunken and old.

  I didn’t care.

  I thought tiredly about the number of gaps in my understanding of what had happened, the mysteries I hadn’t yet solved. There were still several things that could not be explained by Stephen Googling me, hacking my emails or reading my texts. I wondered how I would cope when I worked out what he’d done and I wondered, most of all, why. Why me? Why had he decided to make me a victim?

  Then, as I scanned yet again across the terminal below me, my hat jammed down over my eyes, I saw him. He, too, was scanning, quietly and unobtrusively, from the outskirts. Tall, tanned, eyes like headlights. Ice-blue. Ice-cold. I turned in one movement, sliding out of sight before those eyes swivelled upwards towards the balcony.

  I got my ticket out of my wallet, the other ticket I’d bought with cash at Heathrow earlier. No emails attached to this one. No paper trail. No possibility of Stephen finding me.

  Because right now he fully expected me to be here, waiting nervously for my connection to Thailand. It wouldn’t occur to him that – for the first time – I was one step ahead. He’d wait here for me, and if he couldn’t see me anywhere he’d simply board the connection to Bangkok and wait for me there. It was a plan of chilling genius.

  But mine was even better.

  ‘Because I won’t be there,’ I said to myself. ‘I’ll be thousands of miles away from Bangkok. I’ll be somewhere Stephen will never, ever think to look.’

  With a pleasant fuzzy calm I walked on with my old woven little handbag, the only possession I’d taken, and began to smile. Stephen had turned up here, proving that he had hacked my email, proving that he was – at very best – deeply unstable. He had proved that I was not going mad, that I had every reason to run.

  I had doubted myself again and again since meeting Step
hen. Questioned my sanity, agreed to see a therapist, to dull my brain with medication.

  Enough. I would never again allow anyone to tell me I was mad.

  I turned off my phone and threw it into the bin.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Kate

  A girl lies awake, watching night slowly leach into morning. Above her the ceiling still seems grey and pitted, darkening to black at the edges.

  As if she has been struck, she rolls suddenly on to her side, clutching the striped quilt to her with knuckles whitened by happiness. She breathes in and out, slowly and steadily, marvelling at her body’s ability to regulate itself when it feels like it’s been injected with sunlight, music, the purest oxygen. She watches the rise and fall of the man’s chest beside her and feels seismic joy shifting in her chest.

  She wants more than anything to lean in and kiss him, hold him, watch him wake, but she won’t. She wants him to rest. She worries that what finally happened last night might have put a strain on his still-fragile bones, even though they were the gentlest, sweetest few hours of her life.

  So she lets him sleep, planting the softest kiss on the pillow near to where his head lies.

  She drops her feet cautiously to the floor, perhaps fearing that what is inside her might rush out into the floorboards and disappear, like earthed electricity, into the ground. It does not. It has been a week since they first kissed and the feelings have as yet made no attempt to escape. She is beginning to think that they might actually stay, and with this little hope comes an entirely different future: one of which she should never have dreamed.

  She has her fears, of course, some of which grip her with an iron fist, but now she knows what it feels like to sleep in his arms she is certain that there is a solution to them all.

  A sleepy arm slides out from under the duvet – like a paw – and hooks around her waist, just as she prepares to rise. A muffled sound comes from behind her and smiling, laughing, she folds back down towards its source. There is life! ‘You’re not allowed to go anywhere without kissing me,’ says the muffled voice. He’s like a sleepy bear; her heart is bursting. ‘It’s a new rule. Kissing and cuddling before you start work, even if I’m asleep.’

  She curls around him, kissing the side of his head, his ear, his hair, until a face slides into view. It may be barely awake but it is lit up with a smile that melts her bones.

  ‘Hello,’ says the face, and slides across the pillow to kiss her. ‘You’re my favourite,’ he mumbles, running his nose through her hair. ‘My favourite of all things.’

  ‘Hello, Bear.’ She kisses the bear’s paws all over.

  And she thinks, I love you.

  She dresses fast and effortlessly and within minutes is in cold air that carries the sharp promise of rain. The light is thick purple and grey; the day is drawing near.

  She jumps in fright as a car pulls into the driveway but manages to hold steady when she sees that it’s just the postman’s van. She’ll have to talk to Mark. To her bear. Today. She can’t leave it any longer. He has noticed how jumpy she is; how she watches the driveway whenever she’s outside.

  She heads off to the postbox and her stomach twists uneasily as she tries to imagine what he might say.

  The hedgerow is heavy with sloes, rosehips, bryony vine. ‘It’ll be okay,’ she tells herself, as swallows fly in a silent clump overhead. ‘It’ll be okay.’

  She reaches into the postbox and imagines the people who will have written to her lover today. Computers reporting his financial affairs. A man hoping for a signature on his wife’s birthday card. A farrier needing to be paid.

  Her hands hold the small bundle of letters for maybe twenty seconds before she glances down and sees what is on the top. And then she stops, and the cameras pull sharply away from her: a girl standing alone in a silent corner of Somerset at seven in the morning. The other letters have fallen lightly around her; one rests loyally against her ankle.

  The girl’s face is white as she stares down at the envelope in her hand. She feels the universe cracking around her. I was so happy, she thinks, as she stares at the handwriting she has seen in her dreams a hundred times over. I was so happy.

  Annie Mulholland

  Hythe Farm

  Near Wootton Courtenay

  Somerset

  TA24 0ZX

  ‘Stephen,’ I said into the restless morning. ‘Stephen found me.’ And at that moment the world, in which everything had started to seem possible, slammed shut like a guillotine.

  I sat down in the wet grass. I stared at the envelope with blood pounding in my ears. Stephen Flint had found me. It had taken him a while – nearly ten months – but he’d got there eventually.

  It was the documentary, of course. Why didn’t you go? I whispered hopelessly to myself. Why didn’t you leave when you still could?

  Of course he’d written to me. How much more satisfying this would be, I thought, picturing myself crumpled on the ground by the postbox, my heart pounding and my body shaking like a thin autumn leaf. How much more satisfying than the obvious drama of his sudden arrival in the yard, in a sleek, anonymous car, me screaming and the horses skittering around.

  Almost as soon as I’d sat down I sprang back up. He’s been here, I realized. He’ll have driven down and looked around, so he can picture me right here, having this moment. His prey.

  I started to walk along the hedge back to the farm on legs that didn’t really work. Somewhere near me a solitary wood pigeon sighed. Oo-oooo, oo-oo-oo, it said. I wondered if Stephen was actually watching me now.

  I bent double, suddenly, and threw up into the grass under the hedge, clutching wildly at the twisted branches for support but finding only the thorns of a blackberry bush.

  It took me what seemed like a lifetime to get to my safe place. But as I approached it, I backed away. Blood from my fingertips had smudged all over the envelope and my breathing was ragged. I couldn’t inflict this on Stumpy.

  I doubled back to the other stable block, which was still empty, and crouched in what was once Madge’s stable.

  Annie. Dearest little Annie, who stood by and watched while her friend reported me to the police.

  So here you are, my sweet lover. My girl. Here you are, hiding out on a farm like some rural rat in a shed. An interesting choice, Pumpkin. What took you down there? Was it the idea of another wealthy man you could fleece? Another unsuspecting bloke trying to make an honest living from whom you could leech money and affection and maybe free rent?

  Oh, Annie. I believed you. I believed you were a genuine girl who loved me for who I was, rather than what I had. I honestly thought you didn’t care less about my money or my position. But of course you did. They always do! You wanted somewhere to live, someone to protect you, someone to fund your holidays, someone to buy you expensive dinners. You wanted someone to make your broken life feel easy.

  You rinsed me, Annie, and then you ran off, fuelled by some ridiculous accusation cooked up by a mentally unstable friend who’d found out her husband was a bloody sex cult leader and wanted to punish all men. It blows my mind that you didn’t allow me to tell you what really happened. To show you how amateurishly and spitefully your ‘friend’ had set me up. Instead you just assumed the worst and – zoom! Gone!

  In spite of everything, I never gave up. I couldn’t stop loving you, even if you could me. And so when I saw you on a late-night repeat of some television programme, Annie, I cried. I sat there and cried, and thought, That’s my girl. How moved I was by your concern for a complete stranger injuring himself at Badminton. And then how surprised I was when I called the idiotic woman at this ‘stranger’s’ eventing yard only to discover that the girl who’d been pictured running screaming towards Mark Waverley was ‘his lovely Irish groom, Kate’. She told me she had high hopes for you and Mark. Said you laughed him back to good health. How touching! How very nice!

  You owe me, Annabel. You owe me big-time. You walked out on your contract mid-term and thus you owe me
just shy of twenty thousand pounds to buy yourself out for the rest of the year. You owe me for all the breaks we went on and you owe me for the many, many things I bought you while you shamelessly used me. You owe me rent and dinners and most of all you owe me for the grief I suffered at your sudden disappearance.

  Whatever your friends may have led you to think, though, I’m a decent bloke. I know you don’t have that kind of money so I’m willing to make a trade. In spite of all of the awful things you’ve done to me – the police, the insulting lack of trust, the willingness to just walk out of my life without any thought for me and my feelings, not to mention the vast amount of money you owe me – I’m willing to take you back. Because underneath it all, I’m just a normal guy who loves you. If you come back, move back in, I will forgive it all.

  Remember, Annie. You owe me.

  I’ll pop down to chat this through with you, very soon.

  Your Stephen xxxx

  I scrunched the letter up and sat perfectly still on my heels. The stable was still. It smelt of Jeyes Fluid; Joe and I had scrubbed it down only yesterday. Halfway through the job Mark had texted me and told me to meet him in the hay barn in the top field. I’d run there with my heart pounding happily, thinking, Jilly Cooper would totally have written a scene like this. Except we hadn’t had rampant sex and nobody had invited us to an orgy by a pool. There had been no damp bushes or kohled eyes or women emptying bottles of Je Reviens all over themselves.

  It had really been very tame, me and Mark just lying in a little hay cave, kissing and holding hands and laughing guiltily about our messed-up childhoods. I’d told him about Mum dying, and it had been the easiest thing. Mark had not tried to stop me crying, or to fix me. Neither had he pretended that his own mother had died.

  I was certain Stephen had made up his mother’s death. It was quite a common tool in the psychopath’s infidelity repertoire, apparently: ‘My family are too raw to meet you right now,’ they told their girlfriends. ‘Another time …’ While they ran off to have sex with their other victims.