The Tall Man

by Phoebe Locke

  ‘God, I needed that,’ he said, smiling, and she smiled right back, her heart tripping wildly in her chest.

  25

  2018

  Greta slept badly again, feverish dreams of a Texas backyard; a child digging, their hands and face streaked with soil. A baby crying and a dark, dark wood. Amber; Amber’s face in a car window, looking back at her. Smiling. Screaming. Clothes black with blood. She woke – or thought she did – to the cool pressure of a hand around her throat, a dark shadow bent over her, but then she dragged herself out into full consciousness, the room empty and her phone buzzing on the bedside table. She spent the next ten minutes blinking at the ceiling, wondering why her heart was racing.

  They’d been scheduled to film Amber on a lunchtime chat show today, but at the last minute she was bumped for a soap star recently outed as pregnant by a married co-star. Federica, unusually quiet at breakfast in the hotel, disappeared to her room before the plates had been cleared and a text arrived on Greta’s phone shortly after.

  Had to go out. Tlk later. Entertain A for the day?

  A minute later, in quick succession:

  extra footage would be good. filler stuff

  just chatting?

  take tom out with you

  Three minutes later:

  tell him to just take the DSLR to film. keep a low profile xxx

  And Amber, without noticing that Federica had gone or that Greta was pulling faces at her phone, speared another segment of tinned mandarin and asked ‘If there’s no interview today, can we go shopping?’

  Greta noticed the we. Not I. She’s noticed that a couple of times, now, and it bothers her. As if Amber has gone from the custody of childhood to actual custody and now, in a surrogate kind of way, to theirs. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that she is an adult (legally, at least) and that she can go wherever she pleases, whenever she likes.

  And yet instead of sending her off, Greta simply said, ‘Yes’. Luca had already disappeared too; she assumed to Skype his pregnant girlfriend back in Cardiff. And so she and Tom and Amber went back to their rooms, collected their things and took a taxi from the concrete underground lobby.

  Now, in the fierce white lights of Westfield, she feels more exposed than ever. Amber wanders around, chatting idly, checking her phone, as relaxed as she was when it was just the two of them at Disneyland, even though Tom has the camera constantly pointed at her. They’ve ended up in a shop on the first floor, lights blazing and walls backlit lilac against the endless white of the floor and the carousels and the mannequins. ‘God, these DMs,’ Amber says, laughing, waving the phone so Tom (and the camera) can see. ‘Do these guys actually think I’d date some randomer sending me creepy messages? I mean, hello? I have trust issues, guys.’

  She flicks through a stand of jewellery, heavy chokers clinking hollowly on their pegs.

  ‘Do you?’ Greta asks.

  ‘Well, obviously.’ Bored, Amber moves on to the next rail. ‘The last time I actually liked someone, I found out he was more interested in my dad than me.’ She glances up at them. ‘Shall we go eat after this? I’m starving.’ She walks on without waiting for an answer.

  ‘But how did that feel? With Leo?’ Greta persists, following her.

  ‘What, that my boyfriend was spying on my parents?’ Amber holds a top up against herself in the mirror; scraps of silky white chiffon wrapped improbably into a halter. ‘Come on, Gee. What kind of question is that?’ She glances at Greta and then sighs, thrusting the top back on to the rack. ‘It felt shitty, obviously. I knew he’d played me. I just didn’t get why.’

  She flicks through hangers, moving on to the next rail. ‘I kept replaying it to myself, you know? “Unknown female” – I wanted to know who she was, why this guy cared enough to record it. I needed to know. I needed to know what was in that folder. It probably sounds stupid now, like, why didn’t I grab it, take it with me, right?’

  ‘Or ask him about it,’ Greta suggests.

  Amber, busy swirling around with a scarlet velvet slip in front of her, stops. She looks at Greta, her eyes beginning to narrow, and then she turns away. Greta understands that she has disappointed her. Breached an unspoken contract she didn’t know she had signed. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ Amber asks, bunching up the dress and tossing it into the pile she’s amassing near Tom’s feet. ‘Go up to him and say “Hey, how come you’re stalking my dad?” like he’d give me a straight answer?’

  Tom’s eyebrow quirks up reflexively. Greta knows what he’s thinking: Yeah, exactly that. She tries to catch his eye, wanting to share the joke. Wanting, more than anything, to step out of the circle of Amber’s attention, even for a second.

  Amber shrugs, returning her focus to the rail of clothes. ‘I had to be smart about it,’ she says, and then she plucks out a ragged-looking T-shirt and adds it to the pile. She glances at the camera. ‘I guess that doesn’t sound very believable,’ she says, looking from Tom to Greta, and then, with another shrug, she looks at the pile of clothing. ‘I should pay for these. Hey, want to go to Nando’s for lunch?’

  In the queue for the till, she picks out a blue dress from a rack. ‘This would look great on you, Greta,’ she says, and she moves in close to hold it against Greta’s body. Her flecked green eyes move rapidly over her, returning constantly to Greta’s own. She is close enough for Greta to smell the cigarette on her breath, the last evaporating traces of mandarin. And then, just as quickly, she pulls away, the dress offered out on a finger.

  And Greta, surprising herself, takes it.

  They sit in a corner booth, Greta picking restlessly at a wing while Amber attacks a corncob, butter running down a wrist. Tom, a vegetarian, eats Greta’s rice and sips his second beer. He and Amber have bonded over a love of Game of Thrones and the conversation has devolved into the occasional quote thrown at each other between mouthfuls. He’s set the camera on the table, angled back at them, though they must be moving in and out of shot as they lean forward to eat.

  ‘So come on, Amber,’ Tom says, draining his beer. ‘What will you do now?’

  She stops chewing and looks at him; that same betrayed look she gave Greta earlier. Greta looks at Tom but his face is relaxed, his interest genuine. He considers the empty beer bottle in his hand and then stands it on the table.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Amber says, putting her corn down among the orange-streaked bones on her plate. ‘I guess I haven’t thought about it much.’

  ‘You must have some kind of plan, though?’ Tom asks. ‘Like, what did you want to be when you were a kid?’

  ‘Rich,’ Amber says, sliding a nail between a gap in her teeth. ‘And looks like I kind of ticked that box, right?’

  Tom shakes his head. ‘You’re smart. You know this won’t last. People will forget, life will go on. And you’ll have to, too.’ He considers the carcass on her plate. ‘You can’t dine out on this for ever.’

  Amber laughs. ‘Yeah, thanks, Tom. Don’t worry about me. Like you said: I’m smart. Hey, Gee – you gonna finish those chips?’

  Greta shakes her head, slides the bowl towards her. ‘We should probably think about going,’ she says, and she thinks she might have diverted them both, diffused the moment. But as Amber slides a finger with its spiked nail through the greasy traces of salt at the bottom of the bowl, Tom says softly: ‘It’s never going to go away, you know. All of this will only last a bit longer, but what you did will stay with you.’

  Greta’s head snaps up, her mouth opening though no sound comes out. As if she might be able to stuff Tom’s words into it before they reach Amber.

  And Amber gets up without saying a word. She walks out of the restaurant without looking back, and Greta and Tom watch her leave.

  They met after school though it was almost winter now, the air turning sharp and the daylight already disappearing as the bell for home time sounded. Next to the school was a children’s playground and Sadie waited by the railings with Helen, watching the toddlers playing inside as their pare
nts waited for their brothers and sisters to appear through the gate. She wondered if any of the tiny girls would grow up to be special, if any of them would be taken. The scar on her palm was nearly healed and it itched as the skin knitted together, the line of flesh turning white. She glanced at Helen’s hand but Helen was wearing gloves, a scarf wrapped up tight around her throat and a bobble hat pulled down over her ears in an attempt to ward off the first of the many illnesses the winter was guaranteed to bring her.

  Hers was just a scratch anyway, Sadie thought unkindly, though it was true that Helen had pulled away when Justine put the knife in, her eyes filling with tears. It probably wasn’t enough to be special, Sadie decided. She’d never really believed Helen would be chosen anyway.

  Marie appeared first, a neon yellow bubble blown and cracked in her gum as she made her way over to them. She had her Walkman clipped to the edge of her school bag, the headphones hooked round her neck like a necklace, though Sadie knew they were banned at school. Before they’d even heard of the Tall Man, Marie had known she was special.

  ‘Hey, losers,’ she said, leaning against the railings beside Sadie.

  ‘Hi,’ Sadie said. Marie didn’t intimidate her any more.

  Justine still did. But though they waited until the road was empty and the first stars were beginning to appear in the dirty sky, Justine didn’t show.

  That night Sadie sat up in bed, listening as the house fell silent around her. Her parents were long asleep and the neighbours’ lights had all gone out too, only the occasional headlight of a distant car flickering across her wall. She knew now was the time. She couldn’t let Justine be the only one.

  She traced the scar on her palm with her finger, over and over, and then she closed her eyes and thought of the woods. I want to be special, she thought, each time she touched the scar.

  There was a rippling sound in the room, a scratching in the walls.

  She thought of Justine holding the knife, thought of Helen crouching to scrabble dirt over a photo of herself and Marie, pushing it deeper into the ground. Please let me be special.

  The springs of her mattress squealed, the bottom of it sinking under a sudden weight. Another set of breaths joined hers in the room, his cool and deep and smelling of tree and dirt and ash.

  Sadie opened her eyes.

  26

  2016

  The sun came out again for Jamie’s pool party, after two days of drizzling grey. It pierced through the torn-cotton clouds and the wind scuttled their remains away, letting the light bounce off cars and play through windows. Children freewheeled past houses with their laughing voices and teenagers ventured out into fields, milk-pale skin exposed.

  Amber was getting ready round Billie’s, hair half curled, the straightener smoking beside her left ear. She’d learned to time it perfectly; letting the hair heat until it was almost burnt, pulling the iron through the way her grandmother used to curl ribbon with scissors when she was little. Billie, lingering in the mirror behind her, glanced down at the two phones nestled together on the bed.

  ‘Leo’s calling you,’ she said, smiling.

  Amber shrugged. ‘He can call back,’ she said, the words feeling hollow, and she winked at the reflection of her friend even though she didn’t feel like winking at all.

  Billie laughed and went back to poking at a spot on her chin in the small, smudged mirror inside one of Amber’s palettes of eyeshadow. She watched Amber wind another section of hair around one of the straightener’s blades. ‘Should I curl my hair?’ she asked, uncertainly. ‘Won’t all the curls fall out once it gets wet?’

  ‘Probably,’ Amber said, dragging the straighteners through with a hiss. ‘But I’ve got no intention of getting wet. I’m going to sit in the sun and spike Jamie’s mum’s punch.’ And think about my dad being stalked, she thought. Think about Leo creeping around, watching him. No, she wouldn’t think of those things. She had promised herself. This was a day to have fun, to forget about the many ways her parents and their mistakes crept into her life and her thoughts and her feelings. Her dad was being stalked? His problem. Her mum was completely losing it again? Fine. She was so done with all that. She just wanted to have a good time and be sixteen and not care about either of them.

  But Leo kept calling and she’d have to answer soon. She didn’t want him to realise something was wrong. Or, worse, stop trying before she had time to find out exactly what he was up to.

  ‘Jenna’s calling you now,’ Billie reported, looking at the phones again.

  ‘So get it,’ Amber said, annoyed and trying to disguise it as something nice. A privilege: you can take my call. Step into my shoes. Be me.

  ‘Tell her I’m busy,’ she remembered to mouth, last-minute, Billie wide-eyed and nodding. ‘Hey, Jen!’ she said, bouncing up from the bed and walking over to the window. She often walked around when she was on the phone, Amber noticed. Like Miles did when he was on a work call and uncomfortable.

  ‘Oh, Amber’s . . . um, in the middle of something,’ Billie said, face reddening with the burden or the excitement of the lie. ‘Yeah, she came over to get ready.’

  Amber could picture Jenna’s face as this information computed.

  ‘Ams, what shoes are you wearing?’ Billie asked, coming right up beside her so that Amber could smell the Johnson’s baby lotion she’d smeared all over her legs.

  ‘Just flip-flops,’ Amber said, neglecting to mention they were wedge ones which made her legs look long and thin. Jenna could show up in plain old Havaianas.

  ‘Just flip-flops,’ Billie sang into the phone, skipping away to rifle through her wardrobe.

  The only people (apart from Miles) who Amber had ever seen actually use Dictaphones were people in eighties movies and journalists.

  There was a scandal at Miles’s university once when one of the lecturers slept with a student. Two students actually, which was how he got caught out. They found out about each other and decided to get revenge – smart girls, if you asked her – by telling the papers all about their pervy teacher and how he promised them good grades as he burrowed into them with his wet mouth pressed against their necks and all those promises leaking out into their hair.

  Amber thought it was funny at the time; the pictures in the paper of the lecturer looking old and sweaty and ashamed. Now she couldn’t help wondering if her dad had made the same mistake; if the woman was a student and Leo a journalist writing a story about him. Would he do that? She loved her dad, but she’d long ago given up the idea that he was perfect. He was only human, she knew, and it wasn’t exactly like he’d been getting any action from Sadie for all those years.

  God. Don’t cry, Amber, for fuck’s sake. What are you, ten? She pulled the last strand of hair into the straightener harder than necessary, enjoying the needling feeling in her scalp. She didn’t cry. She never cried. Crying wouldn’t fix anything; it was for weak little babies and she would not be weak.

  ‘OK, byeeeee,’ Billie said, hanging up and tossing the phone back on the bed. ‘Jenna’s getting there for two,’ she said.

  ‘Cool.’ She released the last curl and clicked the straighteners off. A full stop. Don’t think about it. ‘Is your mum still all right to give us a lift?’

  ‘Yep!’ Billie pulled out a T-shirt dress in red and white stripes. ‘Will this look OK?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s nice.’ It actually was, she realised, her heart sinking. ‘What colour’s your bikini?’

  Billie yanked up her top to show her. Navy blue with a white bow in the middle. Cute. Amber smiled at her. ‘Perfect.’

  She turned back round and looked at herself in the mirror again. Orange dress with flowers on, skin tight, exactly how she liked them. Black bikini underneath – a triangle one that she’d stolen from Sadie (wherever Sadie had been, Amber mused, she’d obviously needed a bikini at some point. It couldn’t have been all bad). The bottoms were a bit big on her but they were fine tied slightly tighter at the sides. She’d been pleased with this outfit when she left
the house and yet now, looking at it on, she wasn’t so sure. She couldn’t put a finger on what was wrong with it but there was a word that kept circling in her head as she studied herself: Cheap. It was a word Sadie – or actually Leanna, definitely Leanna – would use, not something Amber would ever say or think. But it was there in her head and it fitted. Billie’s outfit looked properly chosen, like something out of a catalogue. Amber’s, now (so perfect before), suddenly looked like stuff she’d shoved together off a sale rack.

  ‘You look so sexy,’ Billie said wistfully from behind her. ‘I wish I looked like you.’

  And so Amber smiled at her again in the mirror, and applied another layer of lip gloss. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Jamie’s house was on the other side of town, in a big, wide cul-de-sac where the houses had long, sweeping drives and pillars framing the doors. The cars sparkled and the windows gleamed; the walls were uniformly white. Any sound from the rest of the street was drowned out by the thumping dance music coming from the Donnollys’ back garden.

  ‘Give me a call when you guys want to come home, OK?’ Leanna said, looking anxiously up at the house, its windows mirror-flashed with sun.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’ Billie leaned over and kissed her on the cheek; a childish smack of a kiss which made Amber roll her eyes in the back seat. But there was a weird feeling in her chest that was suspiciously like jealousy. If things had been different, would she have been the kind of daughter to kiss Sadie like that?

  She got out of the car in the hope that it would dispel the feeling. ‘Thanks, Leanna,’ she said, clunking the door shut and letting the sun warm her skin. The purple polish she’d carefully applied to her toenails that morning was already chipped.

  Leanna didn’t drive off right away. The car sat idling and she watched them as they went around the side of the house. Amber didn’t look back, linking her arm through Billie’s as they let themselves through the garden gate.