Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  Chapter 24

  ‘IREALLY THINK IT’S TIME I went back to the motel,’ Lottie said.

  She had lost some of her fear of Stacey, who seemed to her now just to be terribly lonely. Over tea, and for a good couple of hours afterwards, she had subjected Lottie to her life story. Abandoned by both her parents, she had lived with her grandfather in the caravan, half of which was now the toilet block. She wasn’t explicit about it – indeed her conversation was full of strange euphemisms that sounded as if they had come from the mouth of someone else – but Lottie had the impression that this man might have abused her. Lottie had talked to enough young homeless people who had left for the same reason to know the signs – the sudden spurts of anger, the desperate lack of confidence, the tendency to pick their way amongst the words of their story, pulling out the bits they could bear to think about. Lottie had been able to imagine her as a child, lonely and scared, waiting for something good to happen and knowing it probably never would.

  It seemed she had first become fixated on Princess Diana on the day of her wedding to Charles. Stacey had been ten at the time. On that July day, when most of the UK had been either studiously ignoring the event, or waving flags and eating sausage rolls at street parties, when Lottie herself had only been a baby, Stacey had been sitting in a caravan, in a town full of rusting metal, watching a fairy tale princess who seemed destined for a happily ever after. Of course, the clues that no good would ever come of it had been clear for all who chose to see them – the distasteful turn of the groom’s mouth, the obliterating veil, the royal family lined up like a drystone wall – but Stacey had been transfixed.

  ‘When she spread out her dress, I could feel my own heart spreading too,’ she had said, with her eyes still full of it. ‘She was so beautiful. So clean and new, like a flower, like nobody I had ever seen in my life before.’

  *

  ‘Can’t you just stay until I’ve done one quick delivery?’ Stacey asked now. ‘I’ll only be gone for an hour at the most.’

  ‘Tina and Spike will be getting really worried about me. Can’t I just phone them and tell them where I am?’

  ‘If you do that they’ll come charging over and spoil our fun,’ Stacey said. Her childlike eyes were pleading.

  ‘I’ve been here a long time,’ Lottie said.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Stacey said, sounding almost rational. ‘I’ll do the delivery and then I’ll pick up some pizza and then we can talk some more and then I promise I’ll drive you back.’

  Stacey bustled around getting Booger his food, humming happily to herself. Then she left, locking the door firmly behind her.

  After Lottie heard the truck start up and then drive away, she pushed against the door, but it didn’t move. The boarded-up window was as securely fastened as she had feared. There was nothing for it but to sit and wait. As always, when forced into contemplation, Mia came to her mind.

  *

  She didn’t know exactly what had made her go round that morning. Some instinct had started to agitate her. Until then she had been obdurate in her belief that it was only a matter of time before Mia came to her senses. Thinking about it now, Lottie saw that it had been a kind of vanity on her part to imagine that her absence or her presence would make the necessary difference. Mia had been fatally entangled; the rope that held her to Rick had gone right through to the very centre of her. Mia’s mistake, if you could call it that, when all the blame and all the crime was his, was to have imagined that her love for Rick was strong enough to protect her. He saw her ability to believe not as something to be valued, but rather as something on which to cast his own endless anger.

  ‘He knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he can’t help himself,’ Mia had once said. ‘He always feels terrible afterwards. It’s only that I sometimes say and do the wrong things. He loves me. He says he’ll change. He says that we can be happier than we have ever been. He says I just have to try and understand.’

  Lottie had woken that day with a feeling that something was terribly wrong. She had dressed so quickly that she had left her shirt unbuttoned and forgotten her handbag. All she knew was that she had to see Mia.

  The house had been quiet when she arrived. So quiet that she had almost turned away, thinking her fears foolish, but she had knocked on the door and waited and then gone round to the back, where she knew there was a key hanging just inside the shed door. Mia had told her about it once – perhaps because she knew that one day it might be needed. Everything was just as it always was – the throw on the sofa folded into a neat oblong, the silver tray that had belonged to Rick’s mother with its usual prescribed gleam – except, on the bottom step, in the cream carpet, there was a rusty-coloured footprint.

  At that moment, she had known.

  Her mind had lost the time in between noticing it and her arrival in the room, but she could remember the blood, an extraordinary amount of it, so much that she didn’t at first see Mia, lying on the floor, her face torn, her arms curved by her sides, her hands extended as though she had been caught mid-embrace.

  *

  The police had rung to say that Lottie was not in any of the local hospitals, and that now she had been gone for several hours they would send out a patrol car to go house to house in the area to check if anyone had seen her.

  ‘Do you think she might have harmed herself?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘No,’ Tina said. ‘She’s on a road trip. She’s fine. She’s getting married in ten days.’

  ‘Although I gather, from what Spike said, that the wedding may now not actually take place?’ the policeman asked, with impressive delicacy.

  They were told the best thing they could do was wait it out, so Tina and Spike sat huddled together on the veranda.

  ‘Do you think I should ring Dean and tell him what’s happening?’ Tina asked. ‘I know he’s going to blame me.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a little soon?’ Spike asked. ‘She could still turn up at any time and we’ll have scared him for nothing.’

  ‘I just think I should. I have a really bad feeling about it,’ Tina answered, and went to make the call.

  *

  ‘He said he’s flying out,’ Tina said when she came back out. ‘I told him that coming all the way here when she’ll almost certainly be found soon was probably an overreaction, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He says he’s been a bit worried about how Lottie seemed during their last conversation. His voice went all wobbly when he was speaking to me. He told me to look after her before we left on this trip.’

  Tina began to cry, and Spike got up and put his arms around her. She hit him in the chest with her fist a few times, and then subsided against him. Spike was seriously alarmed. Tina just didn’t do tears. Her apparent toughness had been one of the things that had drawn him to her in the first place. She had always been so self-contained and resilient.

  *

  While Spike was ringing round all the places they hadn’t managed to visit in their earlier search, Tina went to the car to clear out some of the rubbish they’d collected on their travels. It wasn’t that she thought this was a task that needed to be done, but she couldn’t sit still. Throwing away the empty crisp packets and Coke cans and brushing grit from the floor stopped this twitching and prevented her from dwelling on what might have happened to Lottie.

  She opened the boot and pushed aside the carpet covering the spare tyre well. She was relieved to see that the ashes were still intact. She touched the urn briefly, wondering, as she had before, how a life could come to only this. When she had first gone to pick up her sister’s remains (such a doleful word in its suggestion of ruins, and leftover scraps) from the crematorium, she had sat in the car and opened the vaguely Grecian, double-handled container and looked inside. She had expected something the consistency of sand, and had been unsettled to discover visible fragments of bone. She had wondered if this rough-hewn debris had been the result of a hasty, incomplete process, or whether they had decided at the crematorium that
the bones were necessary to provide the correct amount of verisimilitude. Perhaps people found it harder to believe the reality of their loss when all they had to hold onto was a vase of dust. She closed her eyes and leant against the door of the car.

  A memory came to her. Mia was sitting cross-legged on a lawn. It was a couple of years before she had met Rick. Her hair was long and her feet were bare and she was wearing bright earrings. Her dress had been tucked into her knickers – ‘My gardening attire,’ she had said, laughing. Being near her had allowed Tina to be restful in a way she wasn’t with anyone else. You never had to impress her or convince her, and you could say absolutely anything and she would offer only kindness. Tina had been telling her about a trip away in which she had climbed to the top of a mountain and then abseiled down. She had been taking photographs for a piece about extreme sports.

  ‘You take such risks with your body,’ Mia had said. ‘But you’ve never really allowed yourself to love anyone. It doesn’t get any riskier than that.’

  She had stretched out a hand ringed around the nails with earth and stroked Tina’s face.

  Tina could still feel the gritty sensation of love against her skin. Stinging anguish engulfed her. It was as if something had been let loose in her that she had previously kept locked up. She couldn’t lose another sister. She was culpable for Mia’s death; she couldn’t bear to be responsible for Lottie’s. If she hadn’t persuaded her sister to come on this trip, or primed Spike to flirt with her, Lottie would be at home right now, happily working out her seating plan or buying ugly shoes to match her terrible dress. She almost cried again at the thought of it hanging hopefully in the back of Lottie’s wardrobe.

  ‘I’ve drawn a complete blank,’ Spike said, startling her out of her reverie.

  ‘Have the police called back?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure they’re taking it completely seriously yet. They told me that the vast majority of people return within twenty-four hours.’

  ‘But she’s in a strange country and she hasn’t got anywhere to go and she’s been missing for about fifteen hours, and Lottie wouldn’t do that unless there was a very good reason.’

  ‘I think they’re still assuming she’s gone off in a state and doesn’t want to see either of us.’ Spike looked away. ‘They might be right.’

  ‘However upset she is, she wouldn’t scare us like this. It just isn’t in her nature.’

  ‘I must admit I thought she would be back by now,’ Spike said. ‘She’s not in any of the hospitals, nobody has come upon her by the road or anything – I can’t really think of any other reason why she would be away for so long.’

  ‘Unless someone has taken her,’ Tina said, giving voice to her worst fears.

  ‘I think that’s highly unlikely.’

  ‘She wasn’t really thinking straight. Someone could have stopped right next to her, pretending to ask the way or something. They could have got her into a car and driven off without anyone noticing.’

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ Spike said, although his voice sounded shaky.

  ‘I can’t just sit here and wait,’ Tina said. ‘I’m going to go out and look for her again.’

  ‘I’m not sure it’ll achieve anything,’ Spike said, but she had already made up her mind.

  They drove the same way they had that morning. By now the small towns they passed through were gearing up for the evening. The neon signs were being switched on and the shopkeepers were pulling up their awnings and locking their doors. John Wayne was leaning on a truck and two giant inflatable dinosaurs were shifting slowly from side to side. Tina imagined Lottie’s picture on the TV, the people in the bars they were passing now staring at it as they drank beer. Her own sister in one of those news items that makes everyone shudder and scrutinise the face of the missing person to see if there might be a clue written there.

  ‘Isn’t that Crazy Woman’s truck?’ Spike suddenly said. Sure enough, driving a little ahead of them was the white and silver livery of Diana’s most fervent fan.

  ‘Perhaps she’s seen Lottie. She seems to be around here all the time.’ Tina honked on her horn several times and flashed her lights, but Stacey seemed oblivious, in fact she seemed to speed up.

  ‘We’ll just have to follow her until she stops,’ Tina said.

  ‘She may be setting out on one of her long trips,’ Spike said, but Tina ignored him. She tailed the truck when it turned right at the next junction.

  ‘It looks like she’s going home to Chloride.’

  Stacey carried on through the town, past the shining junk and onto the road they had taken when they went to look at the painted boulders. She stopped outside a tatty house.

  ‘No wonder she prefers to escape into fantasy,’ Spike said, eyeing the pile of old furniture and the mean-looking dog chained up in the yard.

  Spike and Tina drew up next to the truck and got out at the same time as Stacey jumped down from her cab. Tina shouted out a greeting and Stacey turned her head briefly, then scuttled down the concrete path to her front door.

  ‘That’s a bit weird,’ Spike said. ‘Normally she’s all over us, or all over Lottie at least.’

  Stacey shut her front door with a bang. Tina knocked loudly but there was no response.

  ‘We just want to ask you something,’ Spike shouted. He walked round to the side of the house to the boarded window. The dog followed his progress with moist eyes.

  Tina rattled at the door and shouted some more, but it was clear that Stacey wasn’t going to answer. Tina peered through the window of the bit of caravan affixed to the house.

  ‘It smells really bad in there,’ she said.

  She took Spike’s arm and led him back to the car.

  ‘She’s clearly having one of her madder moments,’ Spike said, getting in next to her. Tina drove a little further down the road and stopped where the car wouldn’t be seen from the house.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Spike asked.

  ‘Let’s just wait for ten minutes,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll go back on foot. She wasn’t happy to see us and I want to know why.’

  *

  This time they approached the house quietly. Tina put her ear to the door. She could hear voices.

  ‘Hello,’ she shouted loudly and banged on the door again. There was a short silence and then the sound of something crashing against the floor and a voice shouted back. Lottie!

  ‘Open this door now or we’ll call the police,’ Tina demanded. There was another silence and another clattering fall of furniture and then the sound of a key turning in the lock.

  Stacey looked dishevelled and out of breath.

  ‘I only wanted her to stay for a while,’ she said, as they pushed past her.

  *

  As they drove back to the motel, they asked an exhausted Lottie exactly what had happened.

  ‘She’s a poor old soul. I don’t think she was actually going to harm me.’ Lottie gulped gratefully at a bottle of water. ‘She just wanted to talk to someone about Diana and her own life, which sounds pretty wretched.’

  Spike was getting out his phone. ‘We’ll have to tell the police. She can’t go around kidnapping people and locking them in her house.’

  ‘I think she would have let me go in the end. If you call the police, they’ll probably arrest her. She doesn’t need time in prison – she needs some sort of help.’

  ‘We have to ring the police, Lottie,’ Spike said. ‘Apart from anything else they’re out searching for you.’

  Lottie subsided against her seat. She didn’t have the strength to argue, and it was probably best that the authorities knew what Stacey had done. She would tell them that she didn’t think Stacey was actually dangerous, that what she needed was therapy and medication and some company. She gazed out of the window unseeingly. Tina had promised a trip to cowboy land and burgers and hats, not a spell locked up with a crazy person. This trip was definitely turning out differently to how she had imagined it.


  ‘I rang Dean earlier in the day to tell him what was happening,’ Tina said.

  ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ Lottie asked, turning to look at her.

  ‘You were missing, Lottie. We had no idea what had happened to you. I had to keep him in the loop.’

  ‘You’d better tell him I’m OK,’ Lottie said and turned her head to the window.

  ‘Do you want to speak to him yourself?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Not just now.’

  ‘He’s not answering anyway,’ Tina reported, punching him out a hasty message. ‘I hope this gets to him in time.’

  ‘In time for what?’ Lottie asked. She felt immensely weary. The roadside lights made her eyes feel sore and the man on the radio was talking too loudly about a fire somewhere. ‘The roof has just caved in!’ he yelled. ‘There’s debris absolutely everywhere!’ ‘Could you please turn the radio off?’ She stole a surreptitious glance at Spike, who was driving now that his leg was almost back to normal. He felt her looking at him and turned his head and smiled at her.

  ‘Are you feeling OK?’ he asked in a quiet, I’m-addressing-this-only-to-you tone of voice, and she nodded. He touched her briefly on the leg – a friendly, consoling pat.

  ‘The thing is, Lottie,’ Tina said, ‘I have a feeling that Dean is on his way to meet you.’

  ‘He can’t be!’ Lottie exclaimed, looking astonished and terrified in equal measure. The thought of Dean turning up made her almost want to be back in the house from hell.

  ‘Well, unless he gets my message in time, you’d better put your game face on.’

  *

  Later, when Lottie had showered and eaten a sandwich and got into bed and it was clear she wasn’t going to volunteer any information herself, Tina asked, ‘So you slept with him then?’