Losing You (19 page)

‘On your bike?’

‘Why not? Unless you’re scared.’

It sounded like a challenge. I looked at his thin, pale face; the green-grey eyes. This boy – or young man – was Charlie’s secret life. He might know something, or everything, of what
had happened. He might be an ordinary teenager or he might be violent and disturbed. I shrugged.

‘Nothing scares me now, except what’s happened to my daughter,’ I said, and climbed out of the car, slamming the door behind me. ‘But not too far. I don’t have time.’ I turned to the vicar, who was trying but failing to hide his curiosity. ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘I don’t have time to explain but I’ve got to go now. It’s been very kind of you to try to help.’

‘But I’ve hardly begun.’

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I tell you what, if you leave me the car key, I’ll tinker a bit more, shall I? It might be something simple.’

‘If you want,’ I said. ‘But you don’t need to, you know.’

‘I like mending things.’

I pulled the key off the key-ring and passed it to him, then turned back to Jay. ‘Let’s go, then.’

‘There’s a spare helmet in there,’ he said, pointing behind the seat. I took it out and put it on, adjusting the chin-strap and pulling down the visor. I swung my leg up and over and straddled the seat behind him.

‘Put your feet on those bars,’ he said. I did so. ‘And put your arms round my waist.’ I did. ‘Go with the bike,’ he instructed me. ‘Don’t try to counterbalance it. Relax.’ He turned his head. ‘Not how I’d imagined my first meeting with you,’ he said, and pulled down his visor.

One minute we were by the pavement, the next we were roaring along The Street, so fast that the road melted to a grey river beneath me and the houses blurred. As we accelerated round the corner and headed east, we seemed almost to be lying flat against the surface, like our own shadow. I could have reached out my right hand and flayed the skin off
my knuckles. The muscles in my cheeks dissolved and my stomach turned to liquid. For a few seconds, I wasn’t thinking of Charlie, only of dying. Then the bike straightened again; the world righted itself. Past the boatyards and the caravan site, past the beach where dinghies were turned turtle on the sand, past the beach huts. Houses petering out, the road narrowing.

I held on to Jay, leaned as the bike leaned. Charlie had done this, I thought. She had sat up here and put her arms round this young man’s waist, laid her cheek against the black leather of his jacket as the world ripped by. Then she had come home to me and said nothing about it.

‘This’ll do,’ he said, and we stopped on a track that led from the coastal road down to the shoreline. Behind us lay the town, with its shops, cafés, roads, cars and people. In front was a lonely wilderness of scrubland, marshes and borrow dikes, leading to the open sea. Small waves slapped and hissed against the diminishing stretch of mud. This was a side of Sandling Island that I loved and that scared me. It felt as though Jay and I were the only people in this whole flat grey world, where you couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began. The wind scoured my face as I pulled off the helmet. I swung myself down and found that my legs were trembling.

‘You didn’t do badly,’ he said, pulling off his own helmet.

‘Charlie is missing,’ I said. ‘It’s getting worse and worse. Worse with every minute that passes. The police are asking questions but I can’t sit at home. I’m going to ask you questions that no mother should ever ask her daughter’s boyfriend.’ He gazed at me impassively. It was difficult to be anything but impassive in that wind. I could feel my own face stiffening.
‘It doesn’t matter what you say. I’m not going to judge you. I don’t care any more. I don’t care what you two got up to together. I don’t care that you kept it from me. I want to find Charlie. That’s all. Then everything will be forgotten.’

He stared out to sea and I stared at his face, looking for something, some kind of sign. A small tremor passed over it, like wind across water.

‘I want to help find her,’ he said. ‘Of course I do. I’m sure she’ll turn up. There’ll be a reason. People don’t just disappear.’

Do you know? I thought. Was it you? ‘First off, you have to tell me if there’s anything you know that could help me.

Do you know where she is?’

‘No.’ His eyes were steady.

‘You swear it.’

‘If you like. I swear.’

‘All right, are you Charlie’s boyfriend?’

‘You could call it that.’

‘How long has it been going on?’

‘About four, five months. Since the summer.’

Such a long time, I thought. So many days of keeping it from me, of deceiving me, of pretending she was somewhere else. I thought of all the little things that Charlie confided – and she’d held this back.

‘Why didn’t she tell me?’

‘I don’t know. It was between us. We liked it secret. Things change when they’re public. It felt…’ He stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘We just liked it like that. Adults think they can tell you what to do, they think they can remember what it’s like to be young. We didn’t want that.’

‘Was it serious?’

‘Serious?’

‘Yes. Were you a couple?’ I put my hand on my stomach with a gasp for I had realized I was talking about it in the past tense. ‘Do you love her? Does she love you?’

‘Love?’

‘Oh, fuck this, Jay! Don’t you understand she might be in terrible danger?’

‘We don’t say “love”.’

‘What do you say?’

His face flamed. ‘Stuff,’ he said. ‘You know.’

‘Drugs?’ I asked.

‘Not really.’

‘Don’t piss around.’

‘Dope. Nothing much else. Ecstasy once but she didn’t like it.’

‘Did she tell you anything secret, anything that might be a clue?’

He ground the toe of his biker’s boot into the ground.

‘This is weird.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘She talked about her father a bit.’

‘Go on.’

‘She didn’t like it, the way he doted on her so much. She said it wasn’t fair on Jackson and it gave her the creeps a bit. She didn’t like to discuss it with you because… well, you know, you’re her mother, it would be too weird.’

‘But nothing specific?’ I said.

‘Like…?’

‘Like he was sexually abusing her,’ I said, loud and clear.

‘For instance.’

He winced. ‘No.’ He paused, then said, ‘But she did tell me that she thought all older men were perverts.’

‘Why? Why did she think that?’

‘I don’t know. At the time, it just seemed like one of her wild statements. You know what she’s like. She often said things like that.’

‘Were you having sex?’

He mumbled something.

‘I know you were, Jay, but I need you to tell me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Charlie was scared she was pregnant.’

It was as if I’d slapped him. ‘What?’

‘She’d missed her period.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Didn’t you use a condom?’

‘We didn’t… we weren’t…’

‘I think this might be to do with her being pregnant, or worrying that she might be pregnant. So I need to know.’

‘We haven’t.’

‘Haven’t what?’

‘Haven’t had sex,’ he mumbled.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘That’s up to you.’ He raised his chin defiantly and glared at me. There were splodges of pink on his pale cheeks. ‘It’s true.’

‘You’re telling me you’ve never had sex?’

‘Not as such.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know.’

‘Tell me.’

I wanted to slap him across the face, punch him in his leather-protected stomach.

The wind whipped his hair across his face and his eyes gleamed green. He clenched his fists and, for a moment, I thought he would hit me. ‘It means that whatever else we’ve done together –
you know
what that means – I haven’t had full sex with your daughter. OK?’

‘That can’t be true.’

He shrugged and turned to the sea. ‘Whatever,’ he said.

‘Do you promise?’

‘Promise? Promise, swear, cross my heart hope to die. If I was lying, I’d still promise I was telling the truth, wouldn’t I? She wanted to go on the pill first.’

I thought of Alix, Charlie’s doctor. ‘So is she on the pill?’

‘She didn’t say.’

Maybe those crosses in the diary meant something different, I thought. Perhaps I was on the wrong track. ‘But if you’re telling me the truth, why did she think she was pregnant?’

‘You’d have to ask her that. Sorry, sorry, I know. I didn’t mean that. Look, I don’t know. Maybe…’

‘Maybe what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘Fucking hell.’

‘Tell me. Tell me what you’re thinking.’

‘She had a one-night stand a few weeks ago.’

‘Who with?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who do you think?’

‘I mean it. I don’t know. You think if you go on asking the same bloody question over and over again, I’ll eventually give you the answer. She didn’t say. She just said she’d done
something she regretted and hated herself for it and would I forgive her.’

‘And you did?’

‘It was like her revenge.’

‘You mean you’d done the same?’

‘That’s really not your business, is it?’

‘When did she do this?’

‘A few weeks ago.’

‘When?’ I persisted.

He thought for a moment. ‘Towards the end of last month. I don’t know the exact date. She didn’t tell me. I was away in France on my exchange. She told me when I got back.’

I was making calculations in my head. The last cross in her diary had been on 9 November, so Charlie’s one-night stand had been about two weeks after that. Which would make her almost a couple of weeks late with her period now.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Any other questions?’

‘What else don’t I know?’ I asked despairingly. ‘If I didn’t know about you, there might be all sorts of other things I didn’t know as well. I thought I knew her inside out and suddenly she’s turned into this mystery. Like a stranger to me. I don’t know who she is.’

‘She says she’s close to you,’ said Jay. ‘She says you let her be who she is. Not like her dad. She was going to tell you about us when you were in Florida. That’s what she said, anyway.’

‘I just want to find her,’ I said. ‘If you’ve done anything to her, I swear –’

‘No.’

‘Where did you two meet?’

‘All sorts of places. On the mainland. Sometimes at my place when no one was there, and in Dad’s barns. Or the hulks, though we haven’t been there for a week or so. Too cold in this weather.’

‘You mean those old boats near the point?’

‘Yeah.’

He smiled, and my skin prickled. I felt cold as ice, and scared.

‘Nobody goes there,’ he went on, ‘they’re too creepy. But me and Charlie like them that way.’

The hulks were a collection of houseboats and barges that had seen better days. They’d originally been lived in by artists and sixties’ hippies. I’d seen photographs of them when they were new in the tiny library by the bookshop. Some were small, with square cabins and round wheels at the back, although they never moved away from the shore and at low tide were stranded in the mud. Some were large, and on their decks there were dogs chained to the sides, flowers in pots, chairs and tables, even ironic garden gnomes. They were made of iron and wood, painted in primary colours, and had gangplanks leading to the broad wooden jetties. I think they even used to have their own postbox. Rick had told me that on one of the barges, the couple had made pots to sell in the café; another made nut roasts, bean salads, carrot cakes.

That was then. It had been many years since the boats had been lived in. The hippies and artists had moved away, the paint had peeled from the rusting, blistered hulls; the gangways had collapsed as the boats tipped from their moorings towards the green-grey mud on which they stood. Years of rain and wind had blasted through the cabins. Vandals had done the rest, thrown stones through the windows, ripped
off steering-wheels and torn out seats, beds and tables, painted graffiti on the sodden decks, tipped rubbish into the holds. I’d walked past them a few times with Sludge, but even on a bright summer day they gave me the shivers.

‘Take me there now,’ I said.

‘What for?’ He looked at me as if I was mad.

‘If they’re a private hiding-place for you and Charlie, she might have gone there.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘I haven’t got a car, remember. You’re going to have to take me back on your bike anyway. I want you to come with me.’

‘You won’t find anything. You’re wasting your time.’

‘Then let’s get it over with.’

‘It’s stupid.’

I pulled on the helmet and fastened the chin-strap. Still he didn’t move. I stared at him. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’

‘Course not.’

‘Let’s go, then.’

Without another word, he put on his helmet and started the bike. I climbed on behind him and put my arms round his waist. I tried to think: where had Charlie been, that last week of November? I couldn’t remember. The land blurred past me, I smelt the briny air. There had been a party she’d gone to with Ashleigh, and I’d collected them at midnight, but she’d seemed fine, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she? I remembered her getting into the car in her tiny grey skirt, her long legs in their ankle boots, her shining coil of hair. I closed my eyes as the wind whipped past me.

*

The last time I had walked past the hulks it had been with Christian, in early October. I remembered it clearly, a sharp autumn day. The tide had been low then and the hulks lay in a massed huddle on the mud. There’d been dozens of noisy, cheerful gulls perched on the smashed decks. Now, the tide was high and vicious little waves riffled round the hulls. The wind hummed among the ripped planks. There must have been eight or nine. One of the iron barges had been set on fire since I’d last been there, and now was a charred wreck.

‘Which one?’ I asked Jay, as I dismounted.

‘What?’ He seemed dazed; his face looked bruised in the chill air.

‘Which boat did you and Charlie go to? Jay?’

At my sharp tone, he stared round as if he’d never been there before, then jerked his head. ‘That one there.’