The Weekend Away

by Sarah Alderson

  It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. Maybe Rob’s right and she has nipped out to get coffee or milk or some groceries. But then I remember the stocked fridge. What if she went out with the men for breakfast or brunch? What if they decided after the hot tub to go out clubbing somewhere else? There are lots of reasons she might not be here.

  But she knew about the e-bike tour this morning, which we’ve now missed. Would she abandon me like that? I don’t think she would. We had plans to get lunch too, at a famous seafood place by the dock after we finished the bike ride, and then we planned to do some shopping. She was excited about it. We spent the plane ride chatting about all the things we were going to do when we got here. But maybe she tried to wake me up and couldn’t so went off on her own?

  ‘Look,’ Rob says, ‘I need to get Marlow in the car.’

  Marlow is getting fretful in his arms so I nod, forcing a smile. ‘Bye, darling.’ I wave at my daughter. She doesn’t seem to recognise me or to hear – she’s struggling wildly to get out of Rob’s arms. Since she started crawling a couple of months ago she’s not stopped wriggling and trying to pull a Houdini out of any place we put her.

  ‘I’ll call you later,’ Rob says. ‘Try not to worry. She’ll show up. Call or text me as soon as she does.’

  I hang up, feeling a distinct lack of reassurance. I wish I could have told Rob more about the circumstances but, aside from the fact I feel ashamed as much as alarmed and he seemed distracted, I also know he’d be less than sympathetic if he heard about Kate’s drug taking and her sleeping with random strangers. Rob and Kate have known each other since university. I actually met Rob through Kate, at a party hosted by one of their mutual friends. Rob’s always found Kate a little much, a little too into herself, and way too loud for his liking. He’s also not a fan of her wild partying. Rob’s a round of golf, pint down the pub kind of guy, who cycles to work and works as the financial director of an environmental charity. Kate prefers swanky bars, private limos and wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t earn at least seven figures.

  She’s never said it but I think Kate thinks Rob is boring with his accounting job and his love of DIY, though even she has to concede he’s one of the good ones. He’s hard-working, thoughtful, kind, funny and smart. He does the dishes and the laundry and even came with me on the Women’s March in London earlier this year, carrying Marlow in the sling and wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Raising a Feminist’. He might not be Kate’s cup of tea, but he’s definitely mine. I feel a sudden wave of hot shame wash over me as I remember briefly contemplating having sex with Joaquim. How could I have done that when I’m married to someone as lovely as Rob?

  I try Kate’s phone again though it still goes straight through to voicemail. Something doesn’t feel right, a buzzing feeling in my gut. If those men drugged me last night then who’s to say they didn’t drug Kate as well? What if something has happened to her – something bad? It occurs to me then that maybe she’s had an accident. She could be in hospital. I remember the drugs she was taking last night – all that coke, probably pills too. What if she overdosed?

  I rush into her bedroom, scouring it for clues. There’s an empty wine glass on the side and on the floor beside the bed I find a pair of black lace knickers and a foil condom packet. I check the bin and find a used condom. I back away from it, feeling a little grossed out, my queasy stomach flip-flopping. It confirms she had sex last night.

  OK, I think to myself, scanning the bedroom for more clues. There are two wet towels on the floor. Kate and the men must have been in the hot tub and then come in here and had sex. Did she sleep with one of them or both? One by the looks of things, there being only one condom. But then what happened afterwards? I go into the bathroom and glance in the bin beside the toilet and find another used condom. I stare at it, wondering if it’s proof that Kate slept with both men. It seems a little extra, even for her.

  When I walk out into the bedroom a glint of something shiny catches my eye. The thin filament of light coming through the shutters is refracting against something shiny. I walk around the bed and bend down to examine several fine splinters of glass on the carpet, half hidden beneath one of the decorative pillows that has been flung off the bed.

  I pick up the pillow and stare down at the remains of a broken wine glass beneath, lying among several splashes of what looks like dried blood.

  Chapter Seven

  After spending thirty minutes trying to assess the stain I give up. I’m no CSI expert. Gnawing hunger pains alert me to the fact it’s past lunchtime and I haven’t eaten since last night. My head throbs dully and the thought of eating makes my queasiness return full force, but I make myself eat some of the bread and butter the landlord left in the fridge for us, and while I make coffee I consider my options.

  I try to soothe the anxiety knotting my stomach by telling myself that Kate’s fine. She’s off shopping or getting groceries or she’s gone out to lunch with those two men, or she’s avoiding me for some reason I don’t fully understand. It isn’t blood spilled on the bedroom carpet; it’s red wine. I comfort myself with thoughts of the telling-off I’ll give her when she eventually turns up. I won’t hold back. She’s ruining our trip away. If she has abandoned me for a drug-fuelled weekend of partying and sex, I will be so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive her.

  My anger doesn’t last though. As I walk outside onto the balcony with my coffee and take in the still boiling hot tub and Kate’s discarded dress, an ominous wet cloud settles on me and douses my rage. I set the coffee down and locate the switches for the hot tub to turn it off. In the silence that fills the air after I’ve switched it off, I pick up Kate’s dress and shake off a sudden shiver that runs the length of my body. The worm in my gut has burrowed in deep. If she’s just out shopping why is her phone off and why hasn’t she called me?

  In an effort to cast off my fear I head back inside and in a flurry of activity start to clear the empty wine glasses and bottle of wine, dumping the glasses in the sink. What happened last night? All these gaping black holes have me freaking out. Maybe I should go to the hospital and do a drug test, find out definitively if I was drugged. But what a waste of time. Even if it proved I had been drugged, I still wouldn’t be able to prove who by, so there’s no point and how would I even be able to explain myself when I don’t speak the language?

  As I’m doing a rudimentary tidy-up I have an epiphany. Her handbag! It strikes me then that I haven’t seen it anywhere in the apartment. It’s a Hermès Birkin bag. I’d know it a mile off as I’d enviously admired it when Kate showed it off to me at the airport. I’d assumed it was a fake, given they cost the same as a down payment on a house, but she’d reassured me that it wasn’t, had bragged that it was a divorce gift to herself.

  How could I have forgotten to look for it? I rush back into her room and search, then when I don’t find it, I do another more frantic search of the whole apartment, turning over cushions and opening up cupboards. It’s not here. She must have it with her. That’s a good thing I suppose. It means she has her wallet and her ID with her.

  I jump in the shower – keeping the door to the bathroom and bedroom ajar, so I can hear if Kate returns. As I dry off and throw on some clothes, I decide on a plan of action. I grab my bag and slip on my sandals to run downstairs to the landlord’s apartment. I should have thought of it sooner. Maybe he’s seen her or heard something.

  But there’s no answer when I knock and, thwarted, I head back upstairs. OK, I think to myself, trying to be methodical and practical rather than giving in to the mounting panic I’m feeling, I’ll call the hospital and see if anyone matching Kate’s description has been admitted.

  It takes me a few minutes of searching online to find the number but when I ring I get put through to an automated system that’s in Portuguese. I wait until the very end and, as I’d hoped, the recorded voice tells me to press two for English. It takes me another five minutes to navigate the system and reach an actual human being.

&n
bsp; ‘Hello, do you speak English?’ I say, feeling embarrassed that every English speaker in the world expects the rest of the world to speak their language while making no effort to speak theirs.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman on the end of the phone says.

  ‘Great,’ I say, relieved. ‘I’m looking for my friend. I don’t know what’s happened to her.’

  There’s a pause on the end of the line. ‘She has an accident?’

  ‘No,’ I explain, wishing I’d rehearsed this. ‘I don’t know. I wondered if I could check if anyone had been brought in last night or early this morning. Her name is Kate.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman says, clearly confused. ‘You think your friend is here in the hospital?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. Am I being ridiculous? Kate will probably burst in the door any second, her arms full of shopping bags, laughing at how much of Toby’s money she’s just spent.

  ‘What is her name?’ the operator asks.

  ‘Kate – I mean Katherine – Hayes.’

  I spell it out and can hear some tapping going on in the background. ‘I cannot find in the system,’ the woman tells me.

  ‘OK, thank you. And no one came in without identification?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Is there anything else I can help with?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and the woman hangs up.

  I check my phone again, wondering if maybe Kate’s sent an email – though God knows how she could if her phone is dead – but she hasn’t. I send her one, just in case somehow she has access to a computer. I tell her to call me or email and give her my phone number in case she doesn’t have it memorised. Finally, I scribble a note to her and leave it on the hallway table.

  When I step out onto the street I have to pull on my sunglasses. The sunshine burns my eyes and exacerbates the dull throb at my temples. It’s a gorgeous day and the city looks ripe for exploring. With a pang I think about our now-shelved plans. I should be sitting at a little restaurant on a cobbled side street with Kate right now, eating tapas and drinking chilled white wine, gossiping and laughing, faces turned to the sun, hoping to catch a smattering of rays. Resentment knocks shoulders with anxiety. The ongoing refrain marching through my head gets louder; where the hell is she?

  On a mission now, I start to walk in a grid pattern around the apartment, stopping in any shop, café or bar that looks like somewhere Kate might visit, but the streets are winding and labyrinthine and very soon I’m lost. Still, I keep pounding up narrow lanes and down stairs, the cobbles glossed with age and slick as ice beneath my feet, the sun blistering the sky above my head.

  I know her well enough to know what Kate’s drawn to – anywhere selling handbags and shoes for one, any bar that looks sophisticated for two – definitely no tourist traps, and no restaurants with photographs of food on the menu, and doubtfully any museums or art galleries, though those would be on my list. There are lots of tacky souvenir shops and not much in the way of boutiques but I make sure to check every dark cave-like bar I pass, in case she’s decided on hair of the dog after waking up with a hangover like mine.

  I wonder for a second if the e-bike tour she claimed to be enthusiastic about was actually not something she wanted to do and if she’s therefore run off for a few hours to ensure missing it. Maybe she didn’t hear the part about the bikes being electric and thought it involved actual pedalling. But that seems childish, and why would she lie to me? Kate’s blunt and to the point. She would tell me if she didn’t want to do something. She put the kibosh on us going to the monastery, laughing that it was valuable time when we could be eating or drinking or shopping; why waste it on monks?

  On the corner of a small square beside a church I discover a little café selling coffee and pastries. Kate isn’t inside and I stop myself from going in and asking people if they’ve seen her and showing them a photo on my phone – taken at the airport yesterday of us grinning and drinking champagne. It feels over the top and hysterical to start asking strangers if they’ve seen my friend – the equivalent of putting up missing posters on lamp-posts. Because she isn’t missing. She’s just not in touch.

  I’ve been trying her phone every five minutes or so and I try it again, though without much hope. It rings through to voicemail and I leave another message, perhaps my third or fourth, begging her to please call me back.

  An hour into my search and I still haven’t found her, though what were the chances, really? We could have missed each other in passing easily enough. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and in a foreign city that I don’t know, it’s also like wearing a blindfold. I start to wish I had unspooled a red string as I walked, so it could help me find my way back to the Airbnb. Even using Google maps is difficult as the roads bend in the most frustrating ways.

  Tired, I stop in a little bar with pavement tables, to have a coffee and a custard tart. The waiter takes forever to bring my order – something I realise might be the standard for Lisbon – and I eat the tart without even tasting it. I can’t focus on enjoying anything, even though I tell myself to. I may as well because otherwise when I get back to the apartment and find Kate sitting there among a pile of shopping bags, I’ll be annoyed that I spent the afternoon worrying and not making the most of it. But when I spill the coffee on the white linen tablecloth all I can think about is that red stain on the carpet in Kate’s room. Was it blood? Or was it wine? All sorts of images try to push through the meniscus of my mind, furnished by far too many true crime podcasts and documentaries, but I force them away, mentally refusing to go there.

  My phone rings just then and, hope bursting, I dig it frantically out of my bag. Disappointment hits me when I see it’s Rob, video-calling. I answer.

  ‘Hi, wow, that looks nice,’ he comments, obviously meaning the blue sky and pavement café culture in view behind me, though possibly the remains of the custard tart I’m holding. ‘Did you find Kate?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. I’ve been looking for her. I just stopped for a coffee.’ I pause. ‘I’m worried, Rob. She still hasn’t been in touch.’ I don’t tell him I already called the hospital – he’ll accuse me of over-reacting.

  ‘Did you get in a fight with her or something?’ Rob asks.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I tell him, though as soon as I say it, I pause. Could that be it? Is she annoyed with me for putting up a fight last night about those two guys coming back to the apartment for a hot tub soak? I rack my sinkhole of a mind, trying to dredge up some memories of last night. I do vaguely recall arguing with Kate outside that bar I can’t remember the name of – she ignored me, or at least ignored what I had to say, but we didn’t fight exactly. I was too drunk – or drugged – to offer much resistance. I just wanted to go home to bed.

  Did I say something else to her that I don’t remember? Perhaps when we got back we argued and I don’t remember it. I was so out of it, all I remember is feeling like I was going to be sick, my stomach squirming and bubbling like a cauldron on the boil and my vision blurring. The man – goddamn, what was his name? – helped me to the bathroom. I can still feel his arm locked around my waist. He almost had to haul me upright. But there’s nothing after he put me to bed except blankness, with the occasional shards of memory embedded like slivers of broken mirror that I don’t want to look at too hard in case they reveal glimpses of something I don’t want to see.

  There was shouting. I can hear Kate yelling or screaming. Or am I imagining it?

  I realise that Rob’s been talking this whole time I’ve been searching my memory. ‘What was that?’ I say.

  ‘I was asking where you went last night. Maybe Kate went back there. What if she lost her phone, left it there?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I muse, wondering why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. ‘But I think she had her phone,’ I tell Rob, remembering she used her phone to call a cab when we were outside the bar.

  He’s planted the seed now though, and I wonder if I should head back to the bar to find out if Kate did go back for some
other reason, maybe she left something else – not her phone, perhaps her wallet – or maybe after her marathon sex session she wanted to go out for more drinks. Maybe she hit up a club like she wanted to.

  ‘When did you see her last?’ Rob asks. ‘What time?’

  ‘Last night. I went to bed around two I guess.’ Should I tell him the truth now about the men we met – how Kate invited them back? ‘I was pretty drunk. I don’t remember much.’ As soon as I say the words I know it’s now too late to admit the full story. He’ll wonder why I held back from telling him to begin with and he’ll be suspicious.

  ‘Blimey,’ Rob says, ‘how much did you have to drink?’

  I swallow and force a smile. ‘Oh, you know Kate, quite a bit. We had dinner then went to a bar.’

  Rob raises his eyebrows, smiling. He knows what Kate’s antics can look like. But all I can see is the man with green eyes. What was his name? I wish I could remember. A bolt of nausea shoots through me as I remember that I thought about sleeping with him. I imagined what it would be like. I can hear Kate telling me to do it, encouraging me. What happens in Lisbon stays in Lisbon.

  In the cold light of day as I look at Rob’s open, honest face and worried smile, I feel a huge wave of self-loathing. How could I have even considered it? And now it’s too late to tell him. He’ll think the worst of me and I don’t need to get into a fight with him. I’ve got enough on my plate worrying about Kate without having to deal with that too.