Once in a Lifetime

by Chrissie Manby

‘Put some music on,’ said Nat. ‘It might make you feel less jumpy.’

  ‘I don’t know how to work your music system,’ said Dani.

  Nat’s car was a seriously fancy BMW.

  ‘It’s a touch screen. Like an iPhone. You just turn it on and follow the menus until you get what you want.’

  Dani turned the system on. It started playing the song that had been on when it was last used.

  ‘Say you love me …’ it began. Dani recognised the song in two beats. She stopped it.

  ‘Maybe we should listen to the radio instead,’ she said. ‘For the traffic news.’

  Nat agreed.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Once they were beyond Carlisle, the road finally seemed clearer. It was hard to believe they were still on the same island. The landscape was so very different from that which they’d left behind in Devon. The hills were higher. The valleys were deeper. The light had an entirely different quality. This was a part of Britain that Dani had always wanted to see. Now, however, she couldn’t wait to get through it.

  If Nat was tired – and he must be – he wasn’t complaining about it. Dani had allowed him a half-hour nap in a service station car park in the middle of the afternoon, followed by two strong coffees. He had been up since six, after all, when he drove Lola to Exeter airport for her flight to the Balearics.

  When Dani asked what Lola would think of him driving to Scotland on a mercy mission, Nat said he hadn’t yet told Lola what he was doing. She was busy Instagramming photos of her pedicured toes in the Spanish sand. There was no need to worry her.

  ‘I don’t think she’d be that bothered anyway,’ Nat said.

  ‘Are you having a stag do?’ Now that they were almost in Scotland, Dani made an effort to turn the conversation from her worries for a second.

  ‘Not my style,’ said Nat.

  Nat was never a ‘lad’, that was true. Even when they were teenagers. His friends were like him. Quiet, clever, funny. Deep thinkers who didn’t need to prove themselves by downing pints and getting rowdy (unless you counted his eighteenth birthday debacle).

  ‘Maybe I’ll go for a pint with Dad and my brother-in-law,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll have to watch they don’t tie you to a lamppost at the end of the night,’ Dani joked feebly.

  While Nat drove, a knight in a silver BMW, and the dogs intermittently snoozed and scrapped on the back seat, Dani continued to check her phone obsessively. Every time her phoned pinged to tell her she had a text, her heart soared, only to sink straight back down when she saw that the text was from her mum, who asked every half hour or so whether Dani had heard anything more from their beloved Floss.

  Nothing. It seemed impossible. Nothing at all since that call as they left puppy boot camp. Was there really no one in the whole of Gretna who could provide Flossie with a bit of juice for her phone? Dani began to wonder if Flossie had even tried asking. Was she just too shocked and upset by Jed’s sudden departure?

  Flossie had never really had a boyfriend before Jed. There were boys in her class that she’d had crushes on but those only ever lasted a week or two. So this was her first proper break-up. Dani understood now that what happened after the arrest was not a break-up at all. No wonder Flossie had been so sanguine about it. How would she be handling the real ending of a relationship that had meant so much to her? Remembering her own first heartbreak could still make Dani draw breath.

  Dani squeezed her eyes shut and tried to send her daughter a virtual hug.

  ‘Hang on, Flossie. Hang on.’

  At last the road signs announced that they were crossing the border. They were upon Gretna Green, where the anvil priests had been marrying starry-eyed young couples without their parents’ approval since the 1770s.

  They arrived in Gretna at eight in the evening. Because it was high summer and they’d driven so far north, it was as light there as it would have been an hour earlier in Devon. The place didn’t look quite as Dani had expected. Not so cute. The low buildings looked functional rather than quaint for the most part but it still seemed like a friendly town. Not the kind of place where bad things happened.

  ‘Where should we start?’ Nat asked.

  The little town was busy with tourists and wedding-goers. As they drove through the centre, Dani scanned the crowds for any sign of her precious girl. Her look was, at least, pretty distinctive, with her dirty blonde locks and her big Russian combat boots.

  Nat found a place to park, before he and Dani set out in opposite directions, with one dog each, to search the town on foot. Dani had texted Nat a recent picture of Flossie so that he could show it to hoteliers and bar staff on his phone. Dani did the same, her heart fluttering with optimism and then sinking every time someone seemed to recognise her girl then said, ‘No. I don’t think I have seen her after all.’

  It was such a small town. Flossie stood out even in Newbay, which was far larger. How was it possible that she could have disappeared?

  An hour later, after they’d covered every street in a half-mile radius, Nat and Dani met up again in the town’s centre, in front of the famous white-walled Old Blacksmith’s Shop where weddings were forged on an anvil. Princess and Jezza greeted each other rapturously, as though they had been apart for months. Their owners were less excited. While a gang of delighted Italians posed for wedding photographs beneath a sculpture of interlocking hands, Nat and Dani shared their bad news.

  ‘No luck,’ Nat confirmed.

  ‘Where is she?’ Dani asked. ‘This isn’t exactly a huge teeming city. Somebody must have seen her.’

  ‘Perhaps she left right after talking to us,’ Nat suggested.

  ‘But she didn’t have any money.’

  ‘Maybe she thought she would hitch back.’

  Dani pinched the bridge of her nose at the awful thought. It really was the last thing she wanted to hear.

  ‘Hitch back! Anyone might have picked her up! Oh Nat, what am I going to do?’

  Dani sank down on a bench and buried her face in her hands for a good old cry, ruining the scene for all the tourists who just wanted to take a pretty picture and Instagram it. But Dani didn’t care. Nat sat down next to her and laid his arm around her shoulders. Jezza and Princess both sat at Dani’s feet, gazing up into her face. Anyone who didn’t think that dogs could read emotion had never seen puppies looking as concerned as Jezza and Princess did.

  ‘I should have taken her feelings for him more seriously. I should have told her she could keep seeing Jed so long as he stayed out of trouble. I should have agreed they could go to a festival. I should have hired a car and driven her there. She never would have felt the need to run away then. I did everything I did because I just wanted to keep her safe and now I don’t even know where she is. She could be halfway to Aberdeen in the back of a serial killer’s lorry.’

  ‘She’s not in a serial killer’s lorry,’ said Nat.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Nat had to admit he didn’t really know. ‘But there is such a low probability of that having been what’s happened, Dani. You know that. That’s crazy.’

  ‘I thought there was a really low probability of my daughter running away to get married.’

  ‘Why?’ Nat asked.

  ‘Because I didn’t think she could be so like …’

  Dani didn’t finish her sentence. The tears she had been fighting to hold back all day finally breached her defences.

  ‘Here. Come here,’ said Nat. He held out his arms to her. Dani shuffled closer so that he could wrap her inside them. He held her tightly as she cried out her distress. He leaned his chin on the top of her head and from time to time planted a kiss on her parting as he tried to soothe her.

  ‘It will be OK, Dani. I promise you. We’re not going home until we find your daughter. If we have to stay up here for weeks, I promise we will not go back to Devon without her. I’m with you in this. I’m with you every step of the way.’

  The words were familiar. An echo. Dani sank ag
ainst Nat’s chest. She was tired and more scared than she had ever been but something about his arms around her kindled another tiny spark of hope.

  ‘Let’s go back to the car,’ Nat said. ‘We can cover more ground by driving. If we don’t find her here in the next hour, we’ll try to work out which route she’s most likely to have taken out of town. We will find her. I swear.’

  But just as Dani was texting Jane with the new plan, her phone chimed.

  ‘Mum where the hell are you?’ the text from Flossie asked.

  ‘It’s her!’

  ‘Thank god,’ said Nat.

  Dani called her daughter right away.

  ‘I’m in Gretna. Right in the middle of town.’ Dani stood up on a bench and scanned the people around them. ‘Are you still here? Where are you? We’re in front of the Old Blacksmith’s Shop. The white place? Do you see the big hands?’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ said Flossie. ‘I can see you. That’s amazing. You got here. And Jezza! But who’s the strange bloke you’re both with?’

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  All thoughts of giving her daughter a piece of her mind vanished as soon as Dani saw Flossie running up the road towards them in her big ungainly boots. Dani felt nothing but relief and pure happiness to see her baby girl again. Recriminations could wait for another day.

  ‘Mum! You got here. You really got here,’ Flossie cried.

  Dani folded Flossie into her arms and squeezed her until she squeaked. Jezza did his best to join in.

  ‘You silly, silly girl! Of course I’m here. I came as quickly as I could. Are you OK? Let me look at you.’

  Dani held Flossie at arm’s length for a moment and checked her for obvious signs of mistreatment. Flossie’s face was alarmingly pink – a combination of too much crying and having spent the day in the sunshine without any sunblock – and she looked grubby (so what was new) but she didn’t look as though she’d come to any permanent ill harm.

  ‘I was a bit scared,’ Flossie said. ‘But I knew you’d come and find me.’

  ‘I was so worried. I’ve been feeling sick all day. Why did it take you so long to charge your phone?’

  ‘I asked lots of people to help me, Mum, but most of them waved me away. I think they thought I was begging because of the way I dress. I said I wasn’t but one bloke told me “that’s what all the beggars say” and he wasn’t going to give me the chance to nick his phone.’

  Dani clenched her fists at the thought of anyone being so unkind.

  ‘In the end, a Japanese couple helped me. They wanted a picture of me for their Instagram so I made a deal. They had one of those booster pack things.’

  ‘Oh thank goodness for them. And thank goodness we’ve found you,’ said Dani. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Hungry,’ Flossie said bluntly.

  ‘Me too. I’ll take you both for something to eat,’ said Nat.

  ‘You will not,’ said Dani. ‘After the favour you’ve done for us today? We’re taking you.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me first?’ Flossie asked.

  ‘Nat, this is my daughter, Flossie. Flossie, this is Nat.’

  ‘Nat, your old boyfriend? The one who really changed? Who got all square?’

  Nat raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I was wrong about that,’ said Dani.

  They found a pub where they could take the dogs and ordered dinner. Flossie was ravenous. She said she hadn’t eaten since first thing that morning when she and Jed shared an apple in a lay-by near Carlisle. They had hitched all the way from Devon, spending the night in a service station café just past Liverpool. It was Dani’s worst nightmare.

  ‘When did you start planning it?’ Dani asked.

  ‘As soon as I got my phone back after the police thing. Jed researched it. You can still get married in Scotland when you’re sixteen without parental permission and we thought if we got married, you’d have to believe we were seriously in love and let us be together properly. We were going to find jobs and stay up here until you and his parents calmed down about it and we could come back to Devon without you going berserk. Jed said there was bound to be lots of bar and hotel work. But then we got here and we went from place to place asking for jobs. And some people just flat out laughed at us. One bloke said we should come back once Jed had been to the barber.’

  Dani could understand that.

  ‘I said that maybe Jed should get his hair cut. Maybe we both should. Especially since we were going to be living undercover until we could get married. But he went ballistic. He said that he wasn’t cutting his hair for anyone. If the pub owners couldn’t see beyond his looks, then he didn’t want to work for them anyway. And if I was going to start suggesting he made compromises to his way of life and his beliefs before I even had a ring on my finger, then perhaps we shouldn’t get married after all. And then it just turned into this great big argument about everything we’ve ever disagreed about and he walked off and left me. I stayed put because I really thought he’d come back when he’d calmed down. He’s done it before. But he always came back.’

  ‘He’s left you in the lurch before?’

  Jed was sounding less and less charming by the minute.

  ‘Have you heard anything from him?’ Dani asked. Now your phone is working again?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Flossie confirmed.

  Good, Dani thought.

  ‘He went off with all my money, Mum. The money that Xanthe and Camilla gave me for my birthday tattoo. The money I got out of the building society. All the savings I had. He knew I didn’t have anything else with me.’

  ‘We’ll get that back,’ Dani promised. ‘We know where his parents live after all.’

  ‘I can’t believe he turned out to be like this. I really, really loved him.’

  Past tense already, thought Dani. Better and better.

  After they’d eaten, while Dani and Flossie chatted and hugged as though they hadn’t seen each other in months, Nat walked the dogs again and tried to get some of the tightness out of his shoulders. It was too late to drive back to Devon. Particularly since Nat was the only one insured to drive his BMW. He’d already spent far too long on the road for one day.

  Nat definitely needed a good night’s rest ahead of the long drive home. He fantasised about having a nice warm bath before climbing into a big clean double bed and spreading out like a starfish. But the little border town was packed that summer weekend. Though Dani and Nat tried calling every bed and breakfast and hotel in town, they were out of luck. There was just one room available for miles around, in the last place they would have chosen to stay – a sticky-floored pub called The Sgian-Dubh, which was out near the retail centre.

  The room was the hotel’s best wedding suite – complete with a four-poster bed – which had become suddenly available after a cancelled marriage ceremony.

  ‘Cold feet. Happens all the time.’

  Flossie’s bottom lip trembled.

  Then the hotel manageress said it wasn’t possible to put a third bed in the room.

  ‘It’s not something we’re often asked for,’ she said.

  And in any case, she definitely wouldn’t take the dogs.

  ‘I’ll stay with the dogs,’ said Nat.

  ‘But where?’ Dani asked. A Google search of dog-friendly hotels in the area with availability had drawn a blank.

  ‘In the car,’ said Nat.

  ‘You can’t sleep in the car!’

  ‘I’d be happy to. The seats recline pretty well and right now, I feel like I could fall asleep standing up, like a horse.’

  Nat’s kindness made Dani feel ashamed. But there was no other way that made sense. Nat couldn’t share with Flossie. The hotel owner was adamant that she couldn’t accommodate Nat or the puppies. The best she could do was lend Nat a couple of blankets and a pillow for a night in the car park.

  ‘But if they get dog hair on them, there will be a laundry charge,’ she said.

  ‘They don’t look that clean as it is,’
Dani observed as she helped Nat take them down to the car.

  The landlady overheard. ‘They’re cleaner than your daughter looks,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to bring the car round the back as well. I can’t have people thinking I’ve got a down and out in my car park.’

  ‘A down and out in a brand new BMW,’ Dani observed.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Once Nat was settled in the car, Flossie and Dani went up to the room. The bedroom was as miserable and down-at-heel as the rest of the hotel. It didn’t look like the kind of place you would want to spend your honeymoon, though a guest book on the dressing table was full of messages from people who had done exactly that. Perhaps love made you blind to such things as dust and decay. Dani flicked through their glowing reviews while Flossie was in the bathroom, washing off the dirt of a very long couple of days.

  Eventually, Flossie came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a threadbare white dressing gown that had long since gone grey. All the same, to Dani, Flossie looked like an old-fashioned angel. She offered to brush out the tangles in her daughter’s freshly washed hair, just like she used to when Flossie was small.

  ‘OK,’ Flossie said in a tiny voice.

  Flossie sniffed as Dani brushed away the knots. It was clear that she was trying to hold back tears. Eventually, she turned round and buried her face in Dani’s jumper.

  ‘Mum, I’m really sorry. You were absolutely right about Jed. I should have listened to you. Are you ever going to be able to forgive me?’

  ‘I already have,’ said Dani, as she stroked Flossie’s hair back from her face and kissed her forehead. ‘You’re my daughter and I love you. I’m just happy that you’re safe. Besides, everyone’s allowed to make mistakes when they’re sixteen.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t.’

  ‘I just made them so that nobody found out,’ said Dani.

  One day, perhaps, she would tell her.

  After they got into the bed – which was horribly soft and saggy – Flossie fell asleep quickly, leaving Dani staring at the ceiling, trying to process everything that had happened since she left the house to go to dog training class that morning, oblivious of what lay ahead. Her head ached with the thought of what might have happened had Jed not got cold feet.