by Perks, Heidi
Anna is ordering more drinks. ‘Come with me,’ Grace says. She places a hand on her friend’s arm but it is shaken off. ‘Why don’t you share my cab?’ She wants Anna to come because she doesn’t trust the other three to keep an eye out for her. They don’t even appear to notice there is anything wrong.
But Anna tells her she isn’t going anywhere and so Grace waits at the table, surveying the night as it continues to break down in front of her. In many ways it is a relief to get out of there when the text alert tells her the cab is waiting outside.
Thursday 12 December
The news had spread by twenty to nine the following morning: Anna Robinson didn’t return home after her night out. She hadn’t been seen since some time in the early hours of the morning.
Her husband, Ben, had woken at six to find his wife’s side of the bed unslept in and when he realised she was neither in the house nor answering her phone, he had apparently called Nancy in a panic.
So far the group of year-four parents had gleaned little more than this and they were patching together stories around the playground, making what they could of the basic information to hand.
Every so often their eyes would dart towards the group of three women standing by the railings, and they’d wonder to themselves what they must be saying, because their body language seemed all wrong.
Nancy, Caitlyn and Rachel were spaced apart from each other, their arms wrapped across their padded coats as they tried to keep warm, bobble hats pulled low so you had to strain to see the expression on their faces.
The three friends were usually part of a foursome, but not today. Standing together, immobile, they spoke in urgent whispers.
The school mums wished they had a bit more knowledge about what had happened the previous night. Had Anna left before the others? Had she got a taxi or tried to walk home, but never made it? Had she gone home with someone else? Were her three best friends covering up for her? The latter was a less sinister possibility, yet still worthy of their gossip.
There were too many questions. And the three friends, gathered in their tiny fragmented circle, appeared completely unapproachable.
The mums assumed that the Old Vic had locked its doors at 1 a.m. and the women had stayed inside drinking. The pub was known for this; everyone had done it at some point or other, stumbling home afterwards along the stony coastline if they wanted to sober up, or back through the narrow and dimly lit roads that wound upwards and away from the sea. Past the tightly packed terraced townhouses that lay in ranks of colourfully painted soldiers and eventually on to the new estate.
‘What do you think happened?’ one of the mothers asked. She nodded in the direction of the three friends. Did they only look so misshapen because Anna wasn’t with them? ‘What do you reckon they did?’ she whispered. No one knew if this was meant to sound like an accusation, but none of them questioned it.
‘Surely one of them must know where Anna went after the pub?’ she went on, and they all agreed, because no one could fathom how Anna could have been left behind when the four of them were so inseparable.
Now they watched as Nancy put a hand on Rachel’s shoulder. It was the first contact they had seen between the three friends, but it was only a brief moment before she pulled away again.
In the distance, on the opposite side of the road, they noticed Grace Goodwin’s car pulling up slowly.
‘Was Grace with them last night too?’ someone asked, the thought only just forming.
‘I don’t know,’ someone else murmured. It was a good question. In the last three months they had been watching the dynamics between Grace and the foursome with growing interest.
In the early days Anna was often with Grace in the playground, laughing, smiling, seemingly trying to encourage Ethan and Matilda to talk to each other. But then, as weeks passed, the mums had clocked the way Anna gradually pulled away from Grace. Pulled or been pulled, they didn’t know which.
Some thought it might have been the latter; it was no secret Nancy didn’t like Grace, though they wondered what her reasons could be. Grace was clearly trying to make an effort, and with her husband away she was single-handedly bringing up her child in a place where she knew virtually no one.
Was Nancy jealous of Grace’s arrival?
They didn’t know Nancy particularly well, she’d kept it that way, but her life had been the subject of gossip and speculation over the years. Like the fact that her charmingly handsome husband had suffered a breakdown at the hands of an unrelenting stock market, and they’d had to move back from London to Clearwater to be near her sick mother. That money was tighter now than they’d been used to.
There was no question that Nancy Simpson was something of an enigma.
Grace Goodwin was now slowly opening her car door, and the parents wondered that even if she was with the other women last night, there was a possibility she might not yet know what had happened, because she clearly was in no rush to get her daughter to school.
On the opposite side of the playground, Anna’s son Ethan was playing with a boy called Daniel. There had been no sighting of Ben Robinson and the mums didn’t know if he had dropped his son at school early or if, more likely, Nancy had brought him in. There were only a handful of roads between her house and Anna’s, after all. Maybe Ben had stayed at home, to focus on tracking down his wife.
‘What did he say to Nancy when he called her?’ someone asked.
‘Just what you’d expect. I heard he asked her where Anna was, and what happened to her last night.’
‘What did she tell him?’
‘No one knows.’
‘Someone must,’ she said, and in silence they all turned to look again at the three friends.
Rachel was now sitting on the wall with her head between her hands. Was it too much alcohol the night before or the fear of what might have happened that made her rock gently back and forth?
‘Anna hasn’t been herself lately,’ one of the mums said. ‘I wondered if it was something to do with her dad. He only died a few months ago and she’s been pretty cut up about it.’
The others shrugged, murmuring some kind of agreement.
‘When was Anna last seen?’ someone asked.
‘I heard Nancy say it was two o’clock this morning they all left.’
‘Two a.m.! On a Wednesday night. God, I don’t know how they can do it knowing they have to get up for the school run.’
‘If she walked off on her own in the dark, then anything could have happened. You know there’s no fencing along part of Crayne’s Cliff at the moment, have you seen? It got taken out by the winds.’
The others shuddered at the thought.
‘Why would she have gone up that way?’ someone asked, though they had all likely done it at least once – stumbled up the cliffs at the end of a night and stood at the top, looking down at the town below. ‘You think she could have fallen? It gives me chills just thinking about it, but they’ll check, won’t they? The police will look there first.’
‘Are the police already involved?’
There was a moment’s silence as they all looked at each other.
‘Why wouldn’t they be?’
There were more shrugs. No one had an answer to that.
‘I didn’t think you could report anyone missing for twenty-four hours. An adult, I mean. And besides, why has no one actually suggested the obvious? Maybe Anna didn’t go home because she didn’t want to go home.’
‘You mean she’s left her husband?’
‘And her son?’ A choked laugh. ‘There’s no way …’
Anna was a besotted mother. They all knew it. She admitted once that she still wrote notes on Post-its that she stuck in Ethan’s lunchbox. ‘Every day without fail!’ she had joked. ‘It’s a habit I can’t stop.’ Only today Ethan would be opening his box to find no note inside. No, there was no way Anna wouldn’t be there for Ethan.
‘I can’t imagine her walking home alone from the Old Vic,’ one of them said. �
�It’s so far from her house. She must have called a taxi.’ Despite the fact she was always up for a party, Anna wasn’t careless, she had a sensible head on her shoulders.
‘What does that mean?’ someone asked. ‘If she did call a cab, could something have happened to her on the way back?’
The thought was left hanging as each of them considered the horror. On the whole, Clearwater was spared from such incidents, but it didn’t mean they never happened.
‘Look. Grace is coming up the path.’ They all turned to the gates, to where Grace Goodwin was walking in with Matilda, who was swinging her hand up and then down. Grace was smiling, though her gaze was fixed straight ahead, as if her attention was only partly on her daughter. It was clear to everyone that she hadn’t yet heard the news.
She was almost past the three friends when one of them called her name. Grace was about to find out that Anna had disappeared, and the other parents barely breathed as they watched with morbid fascination. They saw the expression on Grace’s face fall as her hand let go of Matilda. She clearly hadn’t wanted to talk to Anna’s other friends, so if she was at the pub with them last night, then what had happened between them?
Now Grace’s attention was on Nancy, Rachel and Caitlyn in turn as she shook her head from side to side. Her frown deepened, as if she weren’t getting the answers she needed.
Then the bell rang, piercing everyone’s thoughts and creating chaos in the playground as children scurried either to their parents or to their class lines. The mums were caught up in saying goodbyes to their children for the day, a few of them lingering a little longer in a hug and reluctantly letting them go, by simple virtue of the fact that something awful had happened, and they wanted to keep their children close for a moment more.
As the parents walked towards the gate, some stopped and asked the trio of Anna’s friends if they were okay, explaining that they had heard the news and asking to be filled in as soon as anyone heard more. The three women looked worse for wear close-up. It appeared the amount of alcohol they’d drunk the night before was taking its toll.
Grace, on the other hand, just stood there staring, her mouth agape, her eyes wide with disbelief. Soon she was abandoned, as Nancy, Rachel and Caitlyn walked down the path together towards the school gates, Nancy now linking her arm through Rachel’s, maybe to hold her up, maybe for safety in numbers. Caitlyn on the other side of her, like they were about to start skipping down the Yellow Brick Road.
And it had never been so apparent how out of the circle she was.
Chapter Two
Grace
The morning after their night out Grace wakes to find Matilda already dressed for school and standing at the end of her bed. She is in a spectacularly good mood because there is a travelling theatre arriving today whose members are performing some off-the-wall version of Aladdin. Christmas is still two weeks away and in Grace’s mind it’s far too early to be swapping lessons for making paperchains, but Matilda has been eagerly throwing herself into the week’s activities.
It’s a far cry from the hot-weather Christmases they’ve been used to in Sydney, but now that they’re back in England Matilda has been so focused on the fact that it’s bound to snow soon that she hasn’t shown any signs of missing their old home.
Grace has awakened to a dry mouth, a headache and a vague sense of nausea coupled with memories from a horrible evening, although her sore mood is mildly tempered by seeing her daughter so happy. It’s barely even a hangover but it’s there nonetheless, and at 6.45 a.m. she’d really rather turn over, close her eyes, and drift back to sleep.
But now her thoughts won’t let her as they dance around her brain, patching together pieces of the evening in sharp reminders. Grace realises that the feeling settling deep inside her is anger. She has known that feeling too well lately. Each time she hangs up the phone after a distant conversation with Graham it is back again, bubbling furiously.
Matilda has skipped out of the room and Grace realises that without her daughter she would really have no one in her life right now. It is sobering to acknowledge being so alone. The night before only served to reinforce that feeling.
On her bedside table sits a photo of her and Graham in happier times. Sometimes Grace thinks she should move it so she doesn’t have to look at his face every morning, a reminder that he’s living a life she has no idea about in Singapore. She wonders what it would be like to have him here full time. Would they slip back into their marriage, or have too many years of them each living on opposite sides of the world sunk their claws in too deep to repair?
Whenever they speak, and he assures her he’ll be over soon, he always sounds so positive, so happy at first. It’s as if he doesn’t give much thought to the fact that she is effectively a single parent, despite her pointing it out to him. But by the end of their conversations everything has always dulled, and Grace usually hangs up the phone feeling worse than she did before their call.
Possibly they should have the conversation when he is here this Christmas, discuss whether or not he can afford to cut this project short and relocate. Whether he would want to.
Grace sighs as she drags herself out of bed and she goes through the motions of getting herself and Matilda ready for the day ahead. It is not the marriage she dreamed of any longer, that’s for sure, but now she is up her mind drifts to other things, like the fact she has no interest in seeing any of Anna’s friends this morning and knows she’ll have little chance of prying Anna away from them to talk to her.
It’s a surprise when Grace walks through the gates and immediately spots the little group hanging by the wall, with no sign of Anna. She notices Nancy first. And then Rachel, who is bent over double and perching on a low concrete wall as if she’s about to be sick, which in Grace’s mind is a revolting way to behave in a school playground. Slightly to the right of them, Caitlyn is biting a thumbnail as she watches Rachel, a look of panic on her face.
Grace’s first thought is one of hope that if Anna isn’t with them then she might be able to get her alone and find out what the hell last night was about. She goes to walk past the group, noticing how Caitlyn, shoulders hunched and almost subservient in her manner, looks so petite next to Nancy, who’s wearing a long black coat with fur trim around the hood and knee-high black boots. She looks fantastic, even for the school run. Grace has no idea how the woman can drink as much as she did the night before and still look ready to do it again.
But as she goes to pass the trio, even from fifteen metres away, she can sense that something isn’t right. Matilda tugs on her hand, but Grace isn’t concentrating on her daughter any more as she reaches the group. She has no desire to stop and talk while memories of the night before flash like sharp knives in and out of her head. It is not only Anna’s words that stab at her, but the way all of them made her feel like she is no part of their lives.
She’s nearly past them when Rachel stands up and stops her. ‘Grace!’ she calls out, her hands stuffed into the deep pockets of her oversized Puffa coat.
Grace turns. Rachel’s face is washed out, and the remains of last night’s make-up is smudged under her eyes.
‘Something’s happened.’ Rachel’s voice breaks and Nancy steps forward, placing a hand on her arm. ‘You’ll hear it sooner or later,’ she goes on.
‘What?’ Grace asks, unsettled by the looks on their faces.
‘Ben called me this morning,’ Nancy says, her voice so commanding that it drags Grace’s attention away from Rachel.
Ben? It takes barely a second, but still Grace has to think who she means. Anna’s husband, she realises. Ben Robinson. A man she has met a handful of times in the last three months, but only briefly. She still hopes to get to know him better, as he is such a huge part of Anna’s life now.
‘Anna didn’t go home last night. And so clearly we’re all a bit panicked,’ Nancy goes on. Her eyes bore into Grace’s as if she might think that Grace could possibly know more than she does.
‘She didn’t
go home?’ Grace repeats, letting go of Matilda’s hand. ‘What do you mean, she didn’t go home?’
‘When Ben woke this morning she wasn’t there. And she hasn’t been since last night.’
‘Well, has he tried calling her?’
‘Of course,’ Nancy replies, as if it’s the most stupid suggestion she has ever heard. ‘We’ve all tried calling her. Her phone’s switched off. I’ve left a number of messages telling her to ring me as soon as possible, but for some bloody reason she’s turned it off.’ She draws a deep breath before finally looking away. Grace has never seen Nancy drop eye contact before. It jars her.
‘I don’t get it,’ Grace says. ‘What happened after I left? When you went home, I mean. Didn’t she get a taxi with you?’
Nancy bites her lip but doesn’t answer. The others remain mute. Grace looks from one to the other, and waits for what seems like an age for one of them to answer her. ‘What happened?’ she repeats more firmly.
Eventually Nancy shakes her head. ‘We were all drinking; you know how it was.’
‘You mean you don’t remember?’ Grace knows she sounds accusing but she cannot help it.
‘No, I do remember,’ Nancy replies sternly. ‘Anna suddenly got up and said she was going outside, and then …’ Her sentence drifts away.
‘And then what?’ Grace persists, catching Nancy glancing at the other two before Rachel slumps down on to the wall again. Rachel’s face is even more grey now, and her eyes are wide as she drops them, seemingly unable to look at anyone.
‘Well, by the time I went to go home she still hadn’t come back,’ Nancy says simply, waving her hands about her as if to indicate that Anna had just disappeared into a puff of air. Her eyes stare into Grace’s now, goading her to be the one to look away first. It’s a battle of wills that Grace expects. As if Nancy has pulled herself together and is now trying to assert some control again. But with Caitlyn beside her, looking on sheepishly, Grace has the distinct impression Nancy is lying.