The Tall Man

by Phoebe Locke

  Sadie felt that same thrill again, the feeling of anticipation. She remembered schoolyard confidences and arms clutched, giggles and secrets whispered with hot breath into ears exposed by wind-whipped hair. She found herself smiling nervously, her palms slick against the wheel. ‘Sure,’ she said. And then, because she wanted the moment to last, she added, ‘I used to love scary films when I was younger.’

  ‘Not like Dad. He’s such a wimp.’

  And Sadie laughed, the sound soft and solid in her throat. ‘Yes, he’s never liked them.’ The thrill of these exchanged sentences, the linking together of them (Conversation! This was conversation!) thrummed through her.

  And then she remembered why, aged eleven, she had stopped enjoying horror films, and the smile faded. She found she was afraid to look in the rear-view mirror, because in that moment, with its particular cliff-edge of fear, she knew she would find a face there.

  ‘It’s left here,’ Amber said, pointing. ‘And then right.’ She fired off another flurry of text on her phone and then tossed it into her bag.

  They pulled into a congested cul-de-sac and Sadie manoeuvred the car into the only available space.

  ‘You’re better at parking than he is, too,’ Amber said, but she was out of the car before Sadie had even registered that she had paid her a compliment, a gust of night air circling in the space where she had been. She turned off the engine and followed her up the short path to the last cottage in the row; painted a pretty pale yellow, a stone trough of white camellias under its front window. Amber pressed the bell and they both watched through the bubbled glass as a blurry figure came down the stairs towards them.

  And Sadie remembered (though she tried so hard not to, pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes as if this might stop the flow) calling for Helen and Marie; the three of them cycling round to call for Justine. The way they stood on doorsteps together and waited as impatient mothers called their daughters and eyed them with their crushed velvet tops and chokers and their battered bikes leaning against the front steps. She remembered the way she would crack bubbles in her gum, look right back at them. She didn’t care. She thought she was special. They thought he had made them special.

  Leanna opened the door to them, a roll of greaseproof paper in her hand. ‘Hi!’ She stepped back in an almost-bow, ushering them in. ‘Sorry, minor timing disaster in the kitchen.’

  As Sadie followed Amber into Leanna’s hall, copying her as she kicked off her shoes on to the deep-red, tiled floor, all she could smell was freshly baked something: bread or pizza, some undertone of something rich and chocolatey. The hallway was neat and clean and grown-up and it did not help to disperse the feeling that Sadie was eleven again.

  ‘Billie’s upstairs with Jenna,’ Leanna told Amber, though Amber was already three stairs up the flight, her jacket tossed over the banister. Sadie watched it droop and begin to slide towards the floor.

  ‘Here, let me take your coat,’ her host said, coming towards her and plucking Amber’s from the stairs. Sadie shrugged her way out of her denim jacket, suddenly hot, and handed it over obediently.

  ‘It’s beautiful in here,’ she said, watching Leanna hang their coats inside a narrow cupboard. Too early, she criticised herself; all you can see is some floor and the stairs. The walls were white, woodchip; thoroughly uncommentable-on.

  Leanna smiled. ‘Oh. Plenty more work to do,’ she said. ‘Come on through.’

  In the kitchen, copper-bottomed pans glowed against the white wall and a triptych of abstract paintings hung above the wooden table. Sadie’s socked feet felt damp against the tiles and she remembered the plastic bag hanging limply in her hand.

  ‘I brought some wine.’

  She wished she’d brought more; chocolates or olives or at least wine in a carrier bag that wasn’t clinging thinly to the side of the bottle, the garage’s logo distorted.

  ‘That’s so kind of you,’ Leanna said, turning away with it. ‘Let me pour us a glass. Would you like white or red? Or prosecco? A G and T?’

  The choices dazzled her and she had to remember to be decisive, not to dwell. ‘White would be lovely,’ she said, and was pleased with herself.

  She watched her host uncork the wine – taken from the fridge; Sadie’s own bottle peeled from its bag and slid on to the shelf in its place. Was that polite or rude? Sadie couldn’t remember. She took her glass of wine from Leanna, sluiced some around her dry mouth. She let out a small huff of pleasure, and then remembered that she was supposed to control those urges now. Leanna merely smiled and raised her glass for chinking.

  ‘Friday,’ she said, and Sadie smiled too.

  She drank some more wine.

  ‘So, how long have you been in town?’ she asked Leanna, pleased with herself again for thinking of the question. She had practised a couple in the shower earlier that afternoon, trying to remember the sort of things Miles asked people when he first met them. But this one had come quite naturally, without conscious thought. She could do this.

  ‘Oh, a couple of months now,’ Leanna said, and then she gestured to the table with its wide, pale bench, rough-hewn and wild. ‘Please, sit.’

  Sitting on the seat, she found herself thinking of woods; the feel of a damp palm against hers; blades of grass twisted through her hair and her friends laughing beside her. She blinked, dispelling it. ‘It smells amazing in here,’ she said, because one way to silence the memories was to talk over them.

  ‘Oooh. Yes.’ And Leanna was up again; an oven glove in hand, a cooling rack magicked out of a nook somewhere. She was dressed more casually this evening, leggings, a silky long T-shirt, a kimono sort of cardigan that swooped around her as her slender legs pecked quickly across the tiles. Sadie noticed for the first time the different shapes of mother and daughter, compared Leanna to tall, awkward Billie, and the thought comforted her. There were differing levels of distance and closeness, maybe; perhaps each relationship had its own unique DNA that threaded the two together. She and Amber were so obviously, undeniably related physically that perhaps it was only a matter of time before they began to understand each other too.

  Wine. It made her thoughts swell and stretch, expansive and warm.

  ‘How are you finding it here?’ she asked, as Leanna pulled one, two pizzas from the oven, and then: ‘Oh my God, are they homemade?’

  Leanna glanced back, a waft of warmth from the oven crawling through the room. ‘These? Oh, yeah. Thought I might as well knock them up for the girls instead of letting them order in. Not exactly healthy, but better than Domino’s, right?’

  She slid them on to the rack and then returned to the bench. ‘In answer to your other question, it’s been OK. It’s never easy, is it? Moving to a new place?’ She took a sip of her wine and checked herself. ‘Sorry, I don’t even know – have you always lived here?’

  There it was; that sudden bump in the road. That lurch out of sync, the teetering over the precipice. The wishing (oh, the wishing; it was so close to remembering and yet it had its own particular, delicate pain). ‘No,’ she said, soothing her mouth with another short sip, easing the words out. ‘No, Miles and I lived in Reading when we met.’ A lie by omission, though better than an outright one. ‘There’s not much to do here, I’m afraid.’ She tried not to think of those late months of pregnancy, when sleep was erratic and unpredictable, when Miles would stay up or wake up with her and they would drive around at night, trying to imagine where they might live when he had graduated and they could afford somewhere better than that family housing flat near the campus. His parents had lent him the deposit for the house they all lived in now when Amber was almost two. He’d told Sadie that he’d chosen the town because it had always been at the top of her list.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Leanna said, twirling the stem of her glass between her fingers. ‘It feels like there’s plenty going on.’ She picked up her wine and held it carefully for a moment. ‘Of course, we lived somewhere very remote before this.’

  Footsteps thum
ped across the ceiling above them and Leanna glanced up, efficiently attentive and resigned at once. She got up, her wine glass abandoned.

  ‘They look like something out of a restaurant,’ Sadie said feebly, realising that she’d forgotten momentarily that the girls were even upstairs. ‘I’d have no idea where to even start.’

  Leanna dismissed this with an airy wave of a hand. ‘I’ll give you the recipe. Honestly, it’s easy. One of those things that always impresses people without actually taking much effort.’ She took a small sledge of metal from a drawer and moved the pizzas on to two earthenware plates, a stray charred asparagus stalk trailing. ‘I’ll be right back – you OK for a refill?’

  Sadie would have liked a refill, the inch remaining in her glass rock-pool shallow and quickly warming. But she nodded and smiled like she was supposed to, and watched Leanna disappear into the dark hallway. The sound of her footsteps echoed up the old stairs and then Sadie was alone again.

  Her eyes flitted around the kitchen, which obligingly revealed its wares. A tribal statue in the corner beside the hob looked down over the butter dish. A shelf beside the door displayed delicately engraved chopsticks standing sentry on ivory holders. The triptych above the table was red gore spattered with black, the paint so thick in places that she wanted to reach up and pick it like a scab. She looked instead at the framed photos clustered on the windowsill; mother and daughter on beaches, bridges, the edge of a forest. This was not her life. She looked back up at the scabs of paint, the scars left behind by the brush.

  The footsteps coming back downstairs echoed until they fell out of sync, the two sets slipping into their own rhythm as they slapped across the tiles. Billie appeared through the door first; pyjama bottoms flapping, her hair plaited down her back. ‘Hi, Mrs Banner!’

  ‘Hi, Billie. You guys having fun up there?’ She always hated how old she sounded when she spoke to them; the sleazy uncle at a party, some seventies kids’ TV presenter. A kind of auditory rankness that made Amber’s mouth crinkle every time she opened hers.

  But Billie smiled and said, ‘Yes, thanks!’ in an edgeless way, her fingers sliding across the counter to snatch up a stray chunk of ham or bacon left stranded there. She turned as she popped it into her thin-lipped mouth, her hands plucking at the fabric of her pyjamas. ‘Do you like our new house?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Sadie said, taking a sip of wine and remembering not to take another right away.

  ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ Billie grinned at Leanna. ‘Mum thinks it’s too small and shabby, don’t you?’

  Leanna laughed, and the ease with which these smiles and laughs exchanged themselves makes Sadie feel cold with envy. ‘Those might have been my exact words, yes,’ Leanna replied, going to the fridge. ‘Right, I made you girls a jug of mojitos.’ She glanced back at Sadie. ‘Virgin, obviously!’

  ‘Oh my God.’ The smile felt plastered to her face now, clown-leery. ‘Amber’s never going to come home.’ The words, when they were out, felt macabre and loaded. She finished her wine and Leanna, arranging the mint-strewn jug and stained-rim glasses on a tray, noticed immediately. ‘Bill, fill Sadie’s glass, please?’

  Billie came towards Sadie, bottle held out, and Sadie saw an alternate life, where a toddler Amber might have come towards her with a sippy cup or a toy teapot. Where a ten- or eleven-year-old Amber might have approached her with a homework sheet, asking for help. She thought of all the things that could have been; all the things she had given up without knowing each time she had stepped into those woods.

  Wine. It made her frighteningly reflective; she often worried she would drop into one of those thoughts and never resurface.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Billie, who clunked the bottle roughly against the edge of the glass and then fumbled it back into the fridge. The tray of drinks jangled alarmingly as she headed for the door.

  ‘See you later,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Thanks, Mum!’

  ‘Now.’ Leanna pushed the kitchen door to as the music from upstairs got louder. ‘Are you hungry? Have you eaten? I’ve got bread and cheese and things.’

  And, to Sadie’s surprise, she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten; she often forgot, too unaccustomed to caring for herself. And so she watched Leanna pulling down plates from a cupboard, sliding a wheel of camembert into the oven, with something like anticipation. She enjoyed Miles’s cooking – or had done, anyway, back before everything – but with him it was orchestrated and huge, even something simple like scrambled eggs requiring several bowls and pans and that furrowed look of perfectionism pleating his large face. Leanna moved through the kitchen lightly, things collected and deposited as she went, and Sadie struggled to follow the train of conversation, mesmerised by the darting of her hands. She watched the food come towards her; the mismatched pottery plates with wheels and wedges of cheese and sliced sourdough, wedges of apple and some uniformly perfect miniature tarts.

  And then Leanna was sitting beside her, entirely undistracted, and the force of her attention was like a weight, like the sheering force of a snowplough. There was an expectation for words, she knew that much, and so she stumbled for them, her eyes flicking, loose with panic, again around the room.

  ‘You’ve got so many interesting things in here,’ she said (decisive again; she rewarded herself with more wine). ‘You must have travelled a lot?’

  Leanna smiled, a knife slipping effortlessly through the brie. ‘Here and there. Mostly India and the Far East. The Americas.’

  ‘With Billie?’ Sadie’s eyes kept returning to those photos with their blue-sky backgrounds. Not your life.

  ‘Yes, recently. But before she was born too.’ The bottle appeared; more wine slicked into both glasses. She closed the fridge and sat again. ‘I spent most of my teens and my twenties running away, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Huh.’ Sadie took another swig of wine, encouraged. ‘I know that feeling.’

  Leanna glanced at her and then away, her fingers toying delicately with the stem of her glass. ‘How old were you when you had Amber?’

  ‘Twenty.’ More wine now for support; a secret second sip bolstering the first large one. ‘How about you?’

  Leanna was not so easily deflected. ‘Twenty’s young, that can’t have been easy. Had you been with your partner long? Sorry, I’ve just realised I don’t know his name. Miles, did you say?’ The questions felt sharp and probing; an almond-shaped, clear-polished nail slid under the skin seeking, seeking – but in a way, this was a relief. Over the last year, Sadie had become so used to being probed, incised, found lacking, that answering was suddenly easy.

  ‘Yes, Miles. We met at uni so we hadn’t been together long, no. I got pregnant in between first and second year.’

  Leanna picked up a tart but didn’t eat it, holding it elegantly between thumb and forefinger, pincered. ‘Gosh. Did you carry on studying?’

  Sadie was used to these questions and they were easier to answer. Already she had endured a charity event at Miles’s work, his university colleagues asking ‘What do you do?’ and then looking around desperately for someone more interesting to talk to. She had endured his parents’ ruby wedding anniversary, the cousins and the aunts with their paper plates of curling sandwiches and own-brand crisps clutched in hand, gazing at her: Well, you look all right. Time to get back to being a mother and a wife, eh? It was easy, now, to shake her head and think of those early days, that first decision. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I could have, but we decided it’d be better if I didn’t. I thought I’d go back when she was older. Financial reasons, really. I suppose I also wanted to concentrate on her, at least for the first few years.’ There was a lump in her throat but it could have been pastry from the tart she seemed to be crumbling against the plate. Either way, she washed it back with the last of her glass and Leanna, of course, refilled it.

  ‘You know, I really respect that,’ she said, slicing off a sliver of a yellowish blue cheese and catching Sadie off guard. ‘Making a choice is never easy, is it? Esp
ecially when you’re young.’ She fed the cheese between her neat small teeth, sucking a crumb from her finger. ‘And that seems pretty selfless.’

  This kindness made Sadie feel uncomfortable. She couldn’t allow herself, knowing what had come after, to look back at that time through its rose-tinted light. Instead, she said vaguely, ‘I suppose I just thought it had happened for a reason,’ and stuffed a balled-up piece of sourdough innards into her mouth, sweeping away thoughts of those weeks. The pregnancy test on the tiny bathroom floor. The long conversations, the two of them side by side on her single bed, huddled under her smoky duvet. The way she woke one morning, the light filtering through the crooked blinds and her fingers linked in his, and knew what she would do, though it had seemed obvious in the days leading up to it that keeping the child was wrong.

  The days and weeks before her visitors came to find her again, to whisper their message in her ear.

  ‘Well, you ended up with a lovely daughter,’ Leanna said. ‘Amber is so sweet. So thoughtful.’

  Sadie couldn’t stop that first thought from slipping through again: Really?

  Her second, as Leanna topped up her glass, was that she had forgotten she was supposed to be driving.

  12

  2018

  With Amber safely delivered to a café in Santa Monica, where a Rolling Stone reporter sat with a smoothie and an impatient expression, Greta goes to the beach to wait. She checks her emails, her shoes kicked off beside her, socks stuffed damply in the toes. She watches gulls totter through the surf while joggers sheathed in fluorescent scraps chug past her on the sand. She thinks of her parents up in Michigan, imagines them sitting out on their deck, looking over the lake. A beer for her father; tea or perhaps a small vodka for her mother and a slice of her Zwetschgenkuchen on a gold-lipped plate between them, two forks balanced on its rim. She’d hoped to have time to fly up and visit them, but Federica’s ever-changing schedule (and consistent non-appearance) is making that less and less likely.