by Emma Healey
‘Really. We’d better move before he sees us.’
‘Yes, we’d better. He’s lucky we didn’t take a picture,’ Meg said. ‘That’s the kind of image that ends up on the internet.’
#rapture
The internet. Where a bad photo of you could live for ever. Jen had once been interviewed by the local paper during a street party, and the picture had somehow made her look like an overfed toddler. And for years, it had been the first image that came up whenever her name was googled.
Occasionally, Jen looked at Lana’s posts on Twitter and her photos on Instagram, to check there was nothing unfortunate there, to make sure she wasn’t being bullied, or trolled, or sexually harassed. But since Lana’s disappearance Jen had begun to look more closely, more frequently.
‘Are you checking Lana’s Instagram again?’ Hugh said, putting a cup of ginger tea down next to her on Sunday evening. ‘Why don’t you use your phone?’
‘The pictures are too small on my phone. Oh, Hugh, it’s like a different girl.’ Jen didn’t look up from the laptop and tried to pretend the tea was after-dinner coffee, right up until the moment she tasted it and was disappointed. ‘She’s like someone in another country, with another life. I don’t recognize anything, or hardly anything. She doesn’t even look like her.’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. Be the best version of yourself, etcetera.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Jen said. ‘YOLO.’
‘Quite.’ Hugh sat down and closed his eyes.
‘Not bothering with the reading stage of the evening, then?’ Jen asked. ‘Going straight for asleep-in-chair?’
‘As you see.’
Jen went back to Lana’s posts. Recent ones included a photo of a goldfinch on the garden fence (finally, something familiar), which must have been taken from her bedroom. Birds inside and out, Lana had written underneath. It had thirty-three likes. Another was an image of a cave with writing obscuring it: Don’t pity me when I call myself a Nobody, I might be trying to defeat a Cyclops.
‘Very classical,’ Hugh said, as Jen read it out. ‘I wonder if she understands the reference.’
‘And there’s a picture of a cake tin full of chocolate brownies here,’ Jen said. ‘When did she make brownies?’
‘Are you sure they’re hers?’
‘Yes, that’s my cake tin. And she’s put: Homemade brownies motherfuckers. Hashtag baking.’
‘Charming.’
‘Where’re our motherfucking brownies?’ Jen said, then looked up, shocked, in time to meet Hugh’s eyes, shocked. ‘Sorry. I think I’ve been scrolling through for too long.’
‘Well,’ Hugh said, smiling. ‘That’s woken me up.’
‘I am a bit annoyed at missing out on cake. Why weren’t we offered any?’
‘They probably had marijuana in them.’
‘Reassuring, Hugh. Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. Any other revelations?’
‘She has a tattoo.’
‘A what?’
‘Oh, no, that’s Maya’s daughter, Ash. She’s dyed her hair blonde, and they all have the same haircut; sometimes it’s difficult to tell them apart. Lots of pancakes and bacon, lots of photos of her own feet in shoes, lots of photos of her own face, close up. One with a cat. Hugh! It’s the cat. The cat I saw on the stairs. I knew Lana had something to do with it. Those are our curtains in the background, too. I’m going to ask her when she comes down. If she comes down.’
‘Don’t do anything hasty,’ Hugh said. ‘We agreed to tread lightly, remember. What has she written underneath?’
‘Nothing useful. There are just a series of cartoon cat faces, one smiling, one pouting, one with hearts for eyes. Then hashtag kitty.’
‘Maybe the cat ran in, she took a picture, and then it ran out again.’
‘Maybe.’ Jen began swiping quickly through the photos, letting her fingers flick up higher and higher on the touchpad with each sweep, until she remembered the impression Lana had done of her using Hugh’s iPad and made her movements more conservative again. There were no more pictures of the cat, anyway, and she was about to close the laptop when she recognized the shape of the tor near the holiday centre, a jumble of huge rocks which looked like a giant child’s giant Lego project. The photo had been taken from a position that made the sun look as if it was sinking into a gap between the boulders. The toe of Lana’s walking boot was just visible at the bottom of the photo.
Jen turned the screen around to show Hugh and finished the cold dregs of her tea.
‘Last day on Earth,’ she read aloud from Lana’s description. ‘Hashtag rapture, hashtag beautiful, hashtag believe.’
There was a dark shape in the lower-left-hand corner, a peculiar shape that made Jen shrink back in her seat: it was out of focus and too small to be recognizable, but it looked like a person crouching slightly, as if trying not to be seen. The date of the picture was the day before Lana had gone missing.
Nine Ladies
That was the day the sketching group had been taken to the Nine Ladies: a Bronze Age circle of stones, no taller than knee height, in a clearing on the edge of the moor. The stones, misshapen and lichen-encrusted, seemed friendly and rather cosy in the middle of that scrap of woodland, and the English Heritage information boards by the footpath and the rainbow-cardiganed people camping nearby only added to the feeling that any wildness was rather subdued.
However, there was a little flutter of excitement when someone realized there were nine women in their group (and two men), though this meant Lana wasn’t counted and had to be demoted to ‘girl’.
‘They were once believed to be the remains of women who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday,’ Peny said, reading from an information board.
‘Golly, let’s hope we aren’t turned to stone for sketching on a Thursday,’ said the reiki practitioner as she set up her stool and portable easel.
The wood that surrounded the clearing was full of liquorice-scented cow parsley, and the smell, expanding in the damp air, seemed absurdly strong for such delicate flowers. Everyone in the sketching group sat huddled under the birch trees in order to get the best perspective of the stones, but Lana wandered away and spent the session looking up at the oak tree that stood a few metres to one side.
It was strewn with offerings, from modern-day pagans, or perhaps just walkers who were moved by the place. Twigs had been tied together in various shapes (mostly triangles and stars) and hung from pieces of string, shiny ribbons were knotted on to branches, pine cones and shells were twisted around others.
‘Matthew tied those there,’ Lana said, pointing to a collection of brown-and-white striped feathers which spun like a shuttlecock in the breeze.
‘How did he get up there?’ Jen asked, having laid down her sketchbook for a few minutes.
‘Don’t know. He didn’t say. They’re buzzard and kestrel and tawny-owl feathers. There’s a way to tell the difference, but I can’t remember what it was.’
‘The kestrel feathers will be smaller, surely.’
‘Okay,’ Lana said, as if even this guesswork were a kind of showing off.
She walked away, still looking at the tree. There were homemade dream-catchers, and a yellow, knitted flower, and a bunch of tulips, quickly fading, and a woman (Jen assumed) had threaded her hot-pink thong around a cluster of leaves. Rather creepily, someone else had used a length of black chain to attach a stuffed pink washing-up glove to a central branch and the glove stuck up in the air like a dismembered hand. It seemed out of keeping with the rest of the things but, of course, Lana was particularly interested in it.
She took photos and drew some of the more unusual offerings (though these were gone from Lana’s sketchbook when Jen looked the next day), and as they left the place a few hours later Lana ransacked her pockets for something to add to the tree, eventually producing her earphones.
‘You can’t leave those,’ Jen said, though t
he idea that Lana wouldn’t be able to block her out with music was quite appealing.
‘But you hate it when I have them in. You always say you hate it.’
‘That’s never bothered you before.’
‘Well, I guess I thought maybe it’s something I could do for you,’ Lana said, shrugging. ‘I could go without them from now on.’
She began tying the white wires around a low branch, her voice changed by the angle of her throat as she reached up above her head. ‘I think it seems appropriate, anyway,’ she said. ‘Or, like, symbolic. I’m kind of saying we need to listen to nature, or whatever.’
Jen supposed the modern pagans or Druids, or New Age devotees, or run-of-the-mill hippies, would approve, and when the wires were secured she took a photograph of Lana standing with the ear-buds in her ears, as if she were using a stethoscope and listening to the heart of the tree. Lana had put that picture on Instagram, too.
Displacement activity
Jen packed the laptop away in a hurry when Lana came down to watch TV, not wanting her daughter to know she’d been checking her social-media accounts. ‘Stalking,’ Lana called it.
‘What d’you want to see?’ Jen asked.
‘Anything.’
Hugh volunteered to put the kettle on again and came back into the room, muttering. ‘Everything gets lost in this house,’ he said, addressing the television rather than Jen or Lana. ‘What’s this you’re watching?’
‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Jen told him.
‘Not again?’
‘It’s that actress from Upstairs, Downstairs – you remember.’ Jen lifted the remote control but didn’t turn the TV off or press pause or even lower the sound. She waited for Hugh to sit down or leave. He stayed standing, though, hovering over them, as the actress cried during the story of her ancestors’ lives in a workhouse. Hugh’s position didn’t bother Lana, of course, who wasn’t watching the programme.
‘Shit,’ she said, her brows narrowed towards the screen of her phone.
‘What’s happened?’ Hugh asked.
‘Nothing. Autocorrect.’
After a few minutes the programme finished, the actress promising to learn the French horn, as her great-grandfather had been in a colliery band. Jen thought of Stephen’s genealogy-inspired religious conversion and felt that someone should do a study on the influence of family history on the middle aged. The researcher could make up an interest or talent in an ancestor and see if the subject suddenly found they, too, were interested or talented in that direction. Should she go back to university, Jen wondered, and conduct the study herself?
In her imagination, she had completed an MA and a PhD and was about to present her results during an interview on Woman’s Hour. If it went well, her thesis might get into the non-fiction charts; she might be asked to appear on a television show, or be offered tenure at a university (whatever ‘tenure’ was).
Meanwhile, Hugh was still standing. ‘Do you want me to help look for whatever it is you’ve lost?’ Jen asked, getting back to the TV’s home screen and scrolling through the other ten episodes to see if there were any she hadn’t seen.
‘No, it doesn’t really matter,’ Hugh said.
‘Okay, then, do you want to sit down?’
‘I don’t know. I think I’m too restless now. I can’t find my usual mug.’
Jen gazed at Hugh. He didn’t look quite like himself for a moment, or she was unable to recognize him. The shape of his face was heavier than it ought to have been, his nose wider. Then, a moment later, his face was too slight, the nose strangely narrow. It was as if she were seeing him in a circus mirror; the idea of him having a favourite mug had given her a new perspective on him. She looked at Lana, who had always known this about her father, trying to imagine what she saw, but their daughter was still staring at her phone.
‘Which is your usual mug?’ Jen asked in a quiet voice.
‘It’s a Cadbury’s Buttons one. It’s got a good wide handle, so I can get more than two fingers through it.’ He gestured holding a mug of tea with a firm grip.
‘A few mugs got broken last week.’
‘Right. Well. Thanks awfully for telling me earlier.’
‘Oh. What a dickhead,’ Lana said.
‘What did you just say?’ Hugh asked.
‘I didn’t mean you, obviously.’
‘You’re both very grumpy all of a sudden,’ Jen said. She made a mental note to find another Buttons mug on eBay and watched Lana for a moment, wondering what she was typing on her phone, wondering if it was something she’d be able to look at later, on Twitter or Tumblr or somewhere. In the meantime, there was television. She’d spotted another episode of Who Do You Think You Are? that she’d only seen once, and hit play.
An actor she vaguely remembered appeared on screen; he was raking leaves while wearing a flat cap and wasn’t yet in an archive or weeping over any sepia photographs. Jen turned the sound down.
‘I’m not grumpy,’ Hugh said.
‘I’m allowed to be grumpy,’ Lana said at the same time. ‘People can’t help that. And I can’t help it, can I?’ She put a hand up to her hair and gave it a hard twist, the pink scar on her scalp tightening, distorting.
‘Don’t do that, darling,’ Jen said. ‘Actually, I might be able to help.’ Rushing to the kitchen, she came back with a Coke can and held it out. ‘Here you are.’
‘What’s this?’ Lana said, taking it. ‘Are you – are you joking? Or is this some kind of punishment?’
‘Punishment?’
‘Yeah, you give me a Coke, but the can’s empty. Is it meant to be symbolic or something?’
‘No, I thought you might like to crush it. For stress.’
Lana looked at the can for a moment. ‘No, thanks, I’m all right.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah,’ Lana said, handing the can back.
‘Oh.’
‘I’d quite like to crush it,’ Hugh said.
‘It was really for Lana, but okay, you go ahead.’
‘Why was it specially for me?’ Lana asked.
‘It’s supposed to be a good displacement activity. So you don’t take out your frustration on…’
‘On what?’
Jen paused, for a second, less than that. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said, ‘it’s just terribly hard for us, for your dad and me, when we see you…hurting yourself.’
Lana looked back at her phone. It was a tiny movement, but it gave the impression of a large stone door banging closed.
‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, and that’s fine, but you’ve got to let your scars heal properly.’
Hugh sat down finally and sank well back into his chair, staring at the muted television.
‘You have to find other ways to cope with your feelings that won’t inflict permanent damage on your skin.’ Jen thought of the other suggestions she’d read about in the handbook, suggestions which had seemed feasible on paper but which she now realized were absurd. Imagine advising Lana to hold an ice cube or suck on a little packet of wasabi paste. She wondered if the author of the book had ever actually met a teenager.
‘We aren’t blaming you, or judging you,’ Jen said. ‘We’re just trying to give you better tools.’
‘Like an empty Coke can?’
‘I know it seems silly, but it’s just one of many ideas…’ Could she tell her about the wasabi paste? ‘We love you very much. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, fine,’ Lana said, and, grabbing at Jen’s hands, she took the can, crunching the sides in and screwing the ends together. ‘There, happy now?’
No, Jen thought, of course not. But then, happiness was something from a past life; it was the opposite of life now, where you could try to do everything right and yet find you’d made things worse. Happiness was doing everything wrong and finding that things had turned out okay, anyway. Happiness was obliviousness, it was not having to read books about adolescent mental health, it was eating dinner in front of the
TV without consequences, it was buying your children mobile phones and feeding them crisps and forgetting to check their homework. Happiness was everyone in the same room, captivated by their own digital device.
Baby animals
‘Platypus,’ twelve-year-old Lana said.
‘Oh, good one.’
They looked down at their screens, typing. Already, in each person’s search history, a list had formed: ‘baby pig’, ‘baby panda’, baby panther’, ‘baby penguin’. They were doing the p’s.
‘Sweet!’ Jen said, as the series of images of tiny platypuses loaded: some wet, some dry, some asleep, some swimming.
‘Have you got to the picture where it’s curled up in someone’s hands?’ Lana asked, burrowing further into the sofa cushions.
‘Have you seen the really tiny ones that are all pink still?’
‘Funny creatures,’ Hugh said, holding his iPad at a distance. He didn’t entirely approve of this activity and was yet to suggest an animal for googling. ‘This is madness,’ he’d said, several searches ago. ‘What has human interaction come to? Surely we should at least be looking at the same screen.’
‘But we’re looking at the same pictures,’ Lana had said (she’d invented the game, if you could call it a game), ‘so what’s the difference?’
‘They look so velvety,’ Meg said, turning her phone horizontal for a larger image of a baby platypus.
There was a collective sigh and then a pause. Jen’s eyes strayed from the laptop to her family. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Meg was staying until Monday. They were all lounging back, gazing at each other, waiting, thinking. The winter sun came through the sitting-room blinds, the radiators whistled as they warmed up, bowls of half-eaten hummus lay on the coffee table. She gave thanks for comfortable furniture, for central heating, for chickpeas, for reliable WiFi. ‘Porcupine,’ she said.
‘Ha!’
Another pause for typing.
‘They are crazy-looking,’ Lana said. ‘Like mad scientists.’
‘Like they’ve been electrocuted,’ Hugh said. ‘But some of these pictures are definitely of hedgehogs.’