by Jenni Regan
Still, business was good—fantastic, in fact. The film he had taken with Alice had really moved him to the big league, and his audience wanted more. With the help of a mate who had actually finished school and the cash injection he had been blessed with from his trip down south to visit Alice, he now had his own pay-per-view website. He figured that he should be the one making the money from his creative genius.
Admittedly, his market was pretty niche. He couldn’t really understand it, but there were men out there prepared to pay big for films of fat women—the bigger the better. For the first couple after Alice, he had taken a starring role, but he now used a few of the kids who he used to sell a bit of weed to. He also had an editor and a web designer—in reality, brothers of mates—who knew their way around a computer. He told his mum that they were all sitting in his room playing X-box, but he knew that he might have to look at getting an office soon as she kept bursting in with cans of beer and food offerings. He always knew he had what it took to be an entrepreneur, but he had no idea that this would be his business and the one he would be so successful at.
He had little problem finding the right women. Dating apps meant that there was fresh meat on tap. He knew how to approach women, make them feel good and then go in for the kill. Some were surprised when instead of him turning up it had been one of his crew, but they had a 100% success rate so far. They had sex on camera with a variety of women whose need for attention and love was obviously more than their need for privacy. Deep down, he was a bit ashamed of what he was doing; after all, if someone had done that to his mum, he would be angry and distraught. But he guessed that his mum wouldn’t be a slut like the women on here, meeting strange men for sex at the drop of a hat. One of the ingenious ideas he had put on the site was for people to rate each girl on looks and performance. The comments were cruel, but the punters kept paying. They couldn’t get enough.
As Stan came, making sure it was the girl rather than the seats that bore the brunt, he thought to himself that meeting Alice was really the best thing that had happened to him in a long time.
Rachel
12 October 2018, 3 p.m.
Rachel had been shaken by the attack in Bournemouth. She had lived for a while in a squalid flat in one of the less salubrious areas of Bournemouth near a crescent nicknamed junkie town because of the residents that had cared more for little packs of brown stuff than fittings and fixtures. It was here that Rachel had given birth to Alice after she had run away from the darkness in her parent’s home.
In this flat, after Alice was taken away shortly after her second birthday, Rachel spent a couple more years welcoming the oblivion. In many ways, it was a relief to not have another person to think of or worry about. It meant that she only had to worry about where she was getting her next hit. It had taken the death of a friend and not the loss of her own child for her to hit rock bottom.
Cara hadn’t even been a real addict; she just liked to party at weekends. She even had a job and her own lovely flat near the seafront. The rumour was that she would party hard for nine months of the year and then her medical insurance would pay up for a month’s retreat into the nearby Priory for a detox, while she told her work she was on some exotic holiday. Cara was found dead on a sofa on a bank holiday Monday, after the party had spilled into the next week and then ended abruptly.
After this, Rachel had fled from the town to be reborn in London. To her surprise, it wasn’t too difficult to stop taking drugs with the support from workers in a hostel she stayed in for a while. It was the horrific step back into reality that was harder to deal with. She had found a community in South East London, slowly built up a friendship group and eventually got married and had kids with no one finding out about her shady past. If asked, she told people that her parents were dead. They were to her anyway.
These days, she still mourned for Alice, of course, in the same way she still mourned oblivion, but the memories were so vague and so full of horror that she could almost forget that she had another child. She knew Alice had returned to Rachel’s childhood home, which filled her with dread, but at that stage in her life, Rachel had so little to give a child that even that option was better than what was on offer.
Her thought when seeing the horror emerge from Bournemouth was fear for Alice. As far as she knew, Alice still lived a twenty-minute train journey from the seaside town. In the days that followed the attack, she had kept an almost obsessive watch on the news, thinking she had spied Alice’s hair or leg in the footage. In reality, she had no idea what Alice looked like or what she was doing. She knew her brother was in touch, but when they spoke infrequently, she never asked.
It was her punishment to be out of her daughter’s life, which was why she was surprised and horrified when Tom had texted her out of the blue that day to ask if she had heard from Alice or their mother. She wondered if her motherly instinct when it came to her eldest daughter had finally kicked in, albeit twenty years late. The siblings had been close growing up, but she had shielded him from most of what was happening at home, and so, when she fell from grace so spectacularly, Tom had turned his back on her too.
Rachel was instantly worried; it was hard to be concerned about people who she hadn’t seen or spoken to for years, but something that had been pushed deep inside her had been roused. She texted him back telling him that of course she hadn’t heard from them (she was the last person they would get in touch with!) and the texting went back and forth for a good twenty minutes with her gleaning that Tom was worried that something had happened to Alice. Eventually, her phone rang, and she saw his name flash up.
He didn’t bother with any niceties. ‘You see, the thing is, the police think I am being overdramatic because Alice is now a twenty-two-year-old woman and there is no sign that anything bad has happened. But I know Alice, and I know how obsessed she is with her computer, and she has disappeared without a trace. The last time I spoke to her, she was back staying at Mum’s house for her birthday.’
‘Oh, did she move out then?’ Rachel asked, her body flooding with relief.
‘She got her own place in Bournemouth a couple of years ago, around the same time she got the job as an airhostess, but I guess you wouldn’t know any of that.’
‘Have you tried calling her?’
‘Of course, but her mobile isn’t working and even the home phone at Mum’s is no longer available,’ he explained angrily as if she thought he was an imbecile.
‘Maybe she has changed her number or maybe Mum has finally moved out.’
‘It doesn’t add up, though. When I spoke to Alice on her birthday, she didn’t mention a new phone, and don’t you remember Mum always said the only way she would leave that house was in a coffin?’
Rachel felt wounded when he mentioned the birthday. She had remembered, of course. After all, it was her who had brought her daughter kicking and screaming into this world over two decades ago—although Alice wasn’t actually a child anymore and Rachel was officially the mother of an adult.
‘Is there no one else you can ask to check on her, like any of Mum’s friends?’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start. She wasn’t exactly the most popular of women, and I have a feeling she led a hermit’s existence over the last few years. I think the only thing to do is for one of us to check on her, and as I am currently walking through Central Park instead of Regent’s Park, I guess this one falls to you.’
Rachel felt fear and dread grip her. She hadn’t been back to that house since the fateful day her mother had found out about the pregnancy. Any previous expression of motherly love had been wiped out in just a few seconds. But she knew she owed this to Alice. She had been the one that screwed up, and she now had a chance to redeem herself. She promised Tom that she would head down the following week, already thinking of an excuse for her partner. He rang off abruptly, and she reasoned that was his way of showing how little he thought of her.
Alice
It wasn’t long before people were sharing
what was happening. It felt like I was right in the middle of it all, and I could imagine people holding up their phones, more concerned about getting the right video than saving their lives.
Suddenly, I could hear a series of bangs like fireworks or a car backfiring. I watched in horror as people ran through crowds as the camera finally dropped to capture feet rather than the action.
Screams punctuated the air as shots were fired again and people fell to the pavements, like skittles being knocked to the ground.
Abandoning their shopping bags, people looked dazed and bloody.
And then my whole world went dark.
Tom
9 October 2018, 8 a.m.
Tom had sat up all night and watched the coverage of the Bournemouth attack in horror and fascination. It was a town that had been witness to his coming of age as a gay man. Dorchester had no scene, so after some teenage fumbles where a couple of his mates had allowed some drunken groping as long as he didn’t tell a soul, the discovery of a community that was loud and proud was so refreshing. There had been no such thing as Grindr when he was a teen, and the only gay person he had known was one of his teachers (who probably wasn’t actually gay but who had been tagged and therefore branded as a pervert by his school mates). So creeping into a bar at sixteen with an understanding female friend hadn’t just been an eyeopener, it had completely blown his little mind.
Here there were men everywhere, with every flavour imaginable: cute youngsters like him with tight t-shirts on their soon-to-be muscly frames, scary men with moustaches in leather and beautiful women who were really men strutting like peacocks in their resplendent dresses and glittery eyeshadow. This was where he had his first kiss, his first real grope and, after spectating for several months, the place where he lost his virginity high on ecstasy with a man known as Rog. There had been some very hedonistic years, which made him all misty-eyed when he looked around his stunning yet sterile New York flat.
He had been living in London on 7/7 and came to New York only a few years after 9/11, but for some reason it was Bournemouth that really got to him. It was his real hometown, and it had a name, not just a date. His first thought had been to check on Alice. He knew she had been planning a day out and hoped she had encouraged her friends to meet her in sleepy old Dorchester, rather than dragging her out to Bournemouth.
As soon as he had seen the news, he tried to call, but her mobile seemed to be down. He remembered this happening after other attacks as people jammed the networks with calls to loved ones. It was quite normal for them not to speak for a few weeks, but at times like this, he really felt like he needed to be looking out for her. After all, no one else seemed to be.
It was now three days later, and Alice still hadn’t answered either his phone calls or emails. He had even sneaked a look at all her social media profiles, and they all had been left untouched. This was unheard of for Alice who was as addicted to the online world as her mother had been to hard drugs. He still felt a bit silly calling the police and wondered if he could do a social media appeal instead, but deciding to take the grown-up approach, he found the number for the Dorset police and dialled. The phone rang out and he was about to put it down when it was answered with a brusque, ‘Hello?’
Tom was thrown for a moment. ‘Um, hi, yes, I am a bit worried about my niece,’ he told the woman, suddenly very conscious of his mid-Atlantic twang and how it must make him sound like a bit of a twat.
The voice softened slightly. ‘Is she missing?’
‘That’s the thing. I don’t know. I am worried she might have been caught up in the Bournemouth attack as I haven’t heard from her.’
‘Was she in the vicinity of the area when the attack happened?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, but she hasn’t been in touch and hasn’t used social media since then either.’
The voice immediately hardened again. ‘Sir, as you can imagine, we have been inundated by calls. Can you not contact a friend or family member or pop round there?’
‘That’s the thing, though. She lives alone but had been staying with my mother, and we don’t exactly see eye to eye, and I live in New York, so I can’t really pop over.’
Tom could tell by the sound of her voice that she thought he was wasting her time.
‘Sir, I would suggest that a teenage girl taking a break from social media, particularly after recent events, is not really something to worry about. If I could get my kid to take a digital detox or whatever they call it these days, then I would be a very happy parent. However, if you leave me her name and a few details, then I will keep them on file in case something comes up.’ This was said without conviction.
Tom reeled off Alice’s description, knowing this was likely to be shoved in a filing cabinet under ‘overreacting uncle’.
She stopped him mid-flow. ‘You mean she is twenty-two?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought you were talking about a child here! Considering that information, there is little we can do. If an adult chooses to not converse with you, then I think it really is up to them, don’t you, sir?’
Knowing he was defeated and feeling as though he really was wasting precious police time, Tom thanked the woman and hung up.
Alice
At first, I thought maybe a big bomb had gone off, like the nuclear ones I had learnt about in history. I wondered for the second time in my life if I was dead as my eyes got used to the gloom. The first thing I noticed was how silent it was. I had never known silence, really, but it enveloped me, thick in the air. Not even a distant buzz or beep permeated my world. My immediate thought was that this must be part of the war I had been reading about. The only wars I had ever heard about were fought thousands of miles away by people I neither knew or cared about, but Gran had talked about the war her mother had lived in where people would find shelter in their basements to protect themselves from bombs and would constantly listen out for aeroplanes in the sky.
I sat in the dark and listened but could hear nothing. This made me feel calmer, but then I remembered once watching a film at school about that war and hearing that silence was actually scarier than the sound of engines because it meant the bomb had been dropped. It was a bit like how the whoosh had been worse than the bang all those years ago. I was petrified and once again found myself frozen to the spot. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I kept getting flashes of twisted limbs and the pungent scent I now knew signified death.
Part 2
Alice
6 October 2018, 11 a.m.
I woke with a start; the light was streaming in through the windows and my whole body ached from sleeping sitting up. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and the adrenaline had kept me going for a long time until I had finally collapsed. Again, it was the silence that unnerved me at first. I went upstairs to look out of the window to see if the rest of the world had been destroyed, but everything still looked the same. The trees I could see from my windows still stood and the birds still sang.
Maybe they, whoever they were, were uninterested in sleepy, small suburbs. I wasn’t sure if the war had actually reached Dorchester at all, but the news story had said it was spreading across the UK, and with Bournemouth being hit so recently, I presumed that even if they were not yet in control of the whole county, they soon would be. I heard a helicopter fly overhead and wondered if this was the army rule and martial law I had read about yesterday or if it was the enemy. I wasn’t sure if helicopters could drop bombs or if it was just aeroplanes, and I felt myself duck involuntarily.
I dragged myself to the kitchen. Everything looked the same, but there was a new smell. I opened the fridge to see that the light was off and the little remnants of food I had in there were not looking too healthy. I realised that nothing in the kitchen was working, not even the kettle, and that a big pool of water told of a freezer that had warmed and spat its unfrozen water to the lino floor. I realised I was starving and couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. I wondered if the army would be sending food or aid parcels out
like I had seen in other countries when there was a war on.
I picked up a pot noodle and went to switch on the kettle but then remembered that the house had lost its electricity. That was what had caused the darkness and the silence. I ran the hot tap, and after an age, I got a few seconds of warm water to drench my noodles before it went cold again. I sat on the sofa with my meal, and it was as if I had a phantom limb as I kept grasping for my phone, but it was lying with no power and was about as useful as a chocolate teapot. The truth was, I had never just sat. My entire world was lived in front of an audience who in turn amused me. I never even remembered being bored before as I always had the world literally at my fingertips. Now I wondered if that world had indeed ended. If the electricity had gone, then I guessed there would be no way of people getting online. It was the end of the world as I knew it.
I sat and waited all day. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, rescue or the end of the actual world. Without the distraction of food or fun, the day was long. I had no idea what the time was as all the clocks in the house had been digital. I was almost relieved when dusk arrived. With no lights in the house, I was forced to go to bed.