Christmas on Primrose Hill (32 page)

‘Well, Dave made his feelings on the matter very clear,’ Mike said.

‘So did Jamie. And he’s the star,’ Jules snapped testily. ‘Anyway, we all know there’s no way his song wouldn’t win. It’s got Coco Miller in it, and who can resist her?’

Nettie flinched at the barb. She couldn’t believe Jules could be so mean – or angry.

‘Not necessarily. Jamie doesn’t
want
to release the duet with Coco,’ Nettie said archly. ‘He wants to release “Night Ships”.’ She paused. ‘What if he’s using the campaign for his own ends?’

‘So what if he is?’ Jules batted back. ‘Even better – that makes it a win-win.’ The more he does to promote our profile, the better. She looked back at Mike. ‘Look, there’s no doubt this stunt would get a huge reaction and we can still feature in the video with him, just for our song.’

‘It’s not about who wins or which song he releases,’ Daisy said, bringing her support to the debate. ‘There’s no doubt it would get a huge reaction.
Any
new Jamie Westlake single is a big deal. He’s got massive reach and we could really build it up over the course of the week, bringing it to a climax on Friday, the last day of the campaign. Just think how much money we could raise! The promotional opportunities on this would be enormous, even outside of the Net – radio airplay, maybe some TV coverage . . .’

Mike sank back in his chair, outnumbered. ‘We would need to convince the record company there’s absolutely no chance of the wrong song being voted in . . .’ He slapped a hand across his forehead suddenly. ‘No, wait. It won’t work, and I’ll tell you why – the wheels are already in motion. Dave told me they’ve got the Jingle Bell Ball at the O2 tomorrow night. Jamie’s performing the new single with that American girl.’ He glanced at Nettie. ‘You need to go to that, by the way. Dave thought it would be an ideal location for whatever meme you had planned. Guaranteed blanket media coverage. Target audience.’

Nettie opened her mouth to protest – she had been hoping to see Dan tomorrow night; he and Stevie were always in the pub for the quiz and she wanted to make it up to him for running out on Saturday night – but Jules beat her to it.

‘No biggie,’ Jules said, nonplussed and refusing to give up. ‘Jamie and Coco could do their duet tomorrow night, as planned. Then he could debut “Night Ships” on Wednesday.’

‘
Where,
Jules?’ Mike demanded, growing exasperated. ‘Where can they do that with such short notice? This is what I mean. These things are decided and booked months in advance.’

She shrugged. ‘We’ll think of something; Daisy will know someone who can help out. We haven’t done too badly so far, have we? Besides, we’ll need that extra day to rehearse. It will give us time to get straight with it and record the video.’ She shrugged. ‘It really is very simple.’

Mike sighed, not so sure that it was, but worn down. ‘Fine, I’ll try sounding it out to Dave again.’

Jules gave a victorious smile as she twiddled with her pen, and Nettie felt a twinge of anxiety to see her friend’s talent and ambition so clearly laid out like this. As the mastermind of this campaign, she could walk into any job she wanted tomorrow.

‘In the meantime, regardless of whether the song vote comes off, we need to plan a gag to do onstage at the ball tomorrow when Jamie’s singing. We can start tweeting about it today and create extra hype for his performance tomorrow tonight. The ball is being televised live and is so high profile that I think we can put a real premium on minimum donations. I’m thinking fifty thousand?’

Nettie’s phone buzzed with a new text and she picked it up. It was from Gwen.

‘
Urgent. Call me.
’

She stiffened as suddenly as if her bones had been shot through with steel rods. Jules noticed, a quizzical look coming into her darkened eyes before she quickly and pointedly looked away again.

‘I have to take this,’ Nettie said hoarsely, pushing her chair out and standing up.

‘I don’t think so, Nettie,’ Mike said sarcastically. ‘This is important.’

‘So’s this.’

‘Sit down. You can sort out your social life later.’

She should have been angered by his facetious comment. As it was, she hadn’t heard it. Her eyes were glued to the words on her screen and she hurried from the room in silence.

‘Nettie!’ Mike shouted as she ran through the office to the fire escape and stood on the back stairs, the dial tone ringing in her ear as she gazed out into the alley behind them. It was a depressing sight. The London stock bricks, which would once have been a honeyed yellow, were now blackened with grime, and black bin bags bulged out of wheelie bins, large cardboard boxes stacked against the wall and sodden from the sleet and snow.

The line connected and she straightened up abruptly. ‘Gwen, hi. It’s Nettie.’

‘Hi, Nettie. You got my message?’

‘Yes,’ Nettie nodded, trying to read Gwen’s tone. It was placid, as ever. Gwen wasn’t given to extremes of emotions. Nettie supposed that was what made her so good at her job, given that ninety-eight per cent of the time she was having to mete out bad news. ‘What is it? Just tell me.’

There was a brief pause as Gwen took a deep breath. ‘We’ve found her, Nettie. We’ve found your mother.’

Chapter Nineteen

Nettie felt her legs buckle and she sank to the step, her face in her hand. ‘How? When?’ Her voice was a whisper.

‘This morning. She walked into one of our outreach centres.’

Just like that? She just walked into a centre, walked back into their lives? The nightmare was at an end? Nettie curled up, her body folded tight, one hand over her face as she tried to brace against the onslaught of emotions that always had to be so tightly packed away. But there was no holding them back now. It was over. She could relax, just let it all go. She felt the ice that floated like flotsam in her veins begin to warm and thaw. Colours could regain their vividness, music its lyricism—

‘Nettie? Are you there?’

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice split. She raised her head again, staring at a hairline crack in the plaster on the wall opposite as she took a few deep breaths and tried to calm her mind. She had to be practical. Think.

She blinked. ‘Which one?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Which centre did she go to?’

‘Shirland Road. Listen, there’s—’

‘W-where’s that? I don’t know it.’ Panic shot through her limbs. She had covered most of London in the past four years. She should know it.

‘Maida Vale.’

Nettie sat straight. Maida Vale? She could be there in ten minutes if she caught a cab from here. ‘OK. I’m on my way.’

‘No, Nettie – wait.’ Gwen’s voice was jolted out of moderation.

‘What?’

‘She isn’t there now.’

Nettie felt the thaw halt, nature hold its breath. A false spring? ‘But . . . what do you mean? You just said—’

‘She’s gone again.’

Nettie blinked, white noise buzzing in her head. No. ‘Gone how?’

‘She didn’t want to stay.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘She just wanted to let you know she’s all right.’

‘But—’

‘She says she’s not ready to come back yet.’ Gwen’s voice tiptoed down the line. ‘I’m sorry, Nettie. I know this is upsetting to hear.’

Upsetting?
Breaking a heel on her favourite pair of shoes was upsetting. Scratching the car was upsetting. This . . . this was . . . desolation. It was like living with no skin, a glass heart that couldn’t beat. This was surviving, not living. There was more life in her shadow.

‘But if she made contact, if she was the one coming to you, then . . .’

‘It means that she’s closer to coming home, yes. But not yet. She needs more time.’

‘More time? She’s had four years!’ she shouted, her hand gripping the phone so hard her knuckles glowed white. She pulled herself to standing, her hands clutching the sill.

‘I know.’ Gwen’s voice was soothing, understanding. How many times had she heard this very story? How often had she relayed this message to other families? ‘And you’ve done so well, Nettie. You’ve been so strong. I know this isn’t the news you wanted to hear, but it’s not unusual in disappearances of this length of time. Return is very, very difficult and is rarely accomplished in a single visit. But hopefully, hopefully this is the start of the road back.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘No. There are no guarantees.’ Her voice softened further, as though her words themselves were abrasive. ‘We’ve always had to face the possibility that she won’t ever come back.’

Nettie gripped her face, her fingers pressing on her temples so that she saw black spots behind her eyelids. The buzzing in her head was getting louder, a pressure building in her brain. No. No. ‘No.’

‘Net—’

The phone fell from her hand, Gwen’s voice like the distant whine of a mosquito as she looked out onto the bleak landscape – the littered, puddled alley and, above it, moss-infested Victorian rooftops, cracked panes of glass in the sash windows. Her eyes fell to a bottle of gin, half gloved in a brown paper bag by the back corner of one of the bins. The place was neglected and decaying, almost Dickensian in its squalor. For the people living on these streets – the homeless, the forgotten, the missing, her mother – not much had changed.

She had to find her.

Nettie walked for hours, oblivious to the cold pavements transmitting their chill up through her thin leather soles and making her bones ache. The snow was beginning to settle at last – seeping into the suede of her boots and staining them – but that only made her search all the more determined. If her mother was out here, she couldn’t just be left on the streets. Not in these temperatures. Not now she had a location.

She had gone straight to the outreach centre on Shirland Road. Gwen had rung ahead, somehow guessing at Nettie’s plan and authorizing the duty staff to speak to her and transmit whatever information they could. It meant she knew now that her mother’s hair was grey – the auburn highlights long since grown out – and short, properly short, which was going to be disconcerting as Nettie had never seen her mother with anything shorter than shoulder-length hair before.

She’d been wearing dark grey trousers of a track-pant style with a bright pink trim down the sides, trainers and a black fleece. Nettie couldn’t imagine that either: her mother had always worn dresses and skirts and colour. She
loved
colour – their house was yellow, for Chrissakes! Their garden a riot! And when Nettie had been a child, she’d always stood at the school gates in bright florals, swirling skirts and floaty boho dresses with crochet tops. She wore stacked bangles and hooped earrings and wedged sandals that she could run really fast in. She couldn’t imagine her mother in trainers and black and grey.

This was another reason why Nettie had to find her
now.
Take her home
today.
Why did no one else understand the urgency that tomorrow, in all likelihood, her mother would change clothes and these crucial extra identifying characteristics would be halved? Tomorrow she’d just be looking for a grey-haired, short-cropped woman, a stranger.

She searched with frantic eyes, her hands pushing back hedges and bushes, her panic growing as she wandered down narrow side streets and emerged on grand avenues with vast iced Regency villas that held no interest for her – those streets were too clean, too tidy, their outdoor lights too bright, their parked cars too shiny. An aimless drifter would immediately attract attention. Her mother wouldn’t go there.

She tried to keep to the shaded nooks and dark warrens, the rougher areas, but it was harder than it looked. Google Maps didn’t come with a socio-economic listing and she felt like a stranger in her own city, even though she was only two miles along the Prince Albert Road, which ran home. Here, in Maida Vale, everything felt sprawling and Big City, effortlessly leaching into Paddington, Warwick Avenue and St John’s Wood without definition or intention. Primrose Hill wasn’t like that: it wasn’t a district; it was a village, bounded on all sides by the canal, railway and Regent’s Park, and she had grown up within its delineated confines with a distinct sense of seclusion in the centre of the capital city. She had felt safe, locked in by its boundaries, but what if – she realized now, for the first time – what if it had made those on the outside feel locked out?

Had her mother tried to return before? Had she seen her own image on the ‘missing’ posters on the trees and lamp posts, outside the library and community centre and churches, and known there was no way to come back
quietly
?

Nettie called her name as she checked the garages, inside wheelie bins, behind sheds. She checked in the greasy spoons and coffee shops, stopping only briefly for lunch – a warming bowl of
moules
eaten standing up in the window of Café Rouge, her eyes checking every single person who walked by – before resuming her search again. She walked past the cricket ground and tennis courts, past the restaurants and bars, past the church halls and estate agents’ offices. She did Little Venice twice – once on each side of the canal – staring nosily into the brightly painted houseboats that had geraniums and poinsettias stacked on the decks, firewood and watering cans, bikes and gas canisters chained to the roofs.

She felt the canal was her best hope. It seemed the place most like home – the Romany colours of the houseboats not so different from their own yellow house, and certainly standing in contrast to the muted etchings of the Farrow & Ball-painted villas, their vibrant and profuse potted flowers jungle-wild in comparison to the clipped and snipped window boxes and front gardens ten feet above on the streets. She was sure her mother would be drawn to these colours, the sounds of music drifting through the windows.

She walked slowly along the slippy towpath as cyclists glided past her, standing on their pedals and correcting their handlebars, dodging pedestrians walking carefully with arms linked or being pulled along by tiny, sniffing dogs. Joggers padded past with soft-footed strides, hats and gloves on, headphone wires dangling down their tops and their breath coming in white puffs. They all had somewhere to be, these people – all had somewhere to go – and she watched them with envious eyes. That was one of the things that had surprised her most when her mother had first gone and she had first started to search – how hard it was just to wander. When you have no money to go to the shops or the cinema or the garden centre or bingo hall, the day contracts down to finding the next bench to sit on, the next bin to raid, the next roof to shelter beneath. At least, that was how Nettie imagined it to be. She had spent so many hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to get inside her mother’s head, to try to understand
why
, to try to decipher
where
. . .