Losing You (9 page)

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve here,’ said Alix, frostily. ‘I understand you’re concerned, but if you think you’ll do any good by making wild accusations, you’re quite mistaken. The girls have told you everything that happened.’

I stood up.

‘I’m not
concerned
, I’m scared. And I’ll do whatever I can to find Charlie. Listen, if you two think of anything –
anything
– you have to get in touch.’ I saw a Post-it pad and pen lying near the phone. I scribbled down my mobile and landline numbers. ‘There. Just call me.’

They nodded mutely.

‘I can see myself out,’ I said to Alix, as she rose from the table.

But she followed me to the door and shut it firmly behind me. I was already running down the path, running because I had to do something, although I had no idea what.

I went to Suzie’s house. Suzie was a languid girl who, on the few occasions I’d met her, scarcely spoke but always wore a half-smile that gave nothing away. Charlie had told me she was powerful at school, precisely because of her inscrutable passivity.

I knocked on the door and Suzie’s mother opened it, wearing an old tracksuit and washing-up gloves. Behind her, there was the sound of a TV at full volume and, over that, children fighting. A scream like a drill cut through the air, then someone weeping steadily.

‘Hello?’ she said, then, turning her head, shouted, ‘Shut up, you boys. Sorry. It’s Nina, isn’t it? Charlotte’s mother.’

And she frowned at me. Like Alix, Suzie’s mother – whose name I couldn’t remember – had been informed that her daughter was part of the group who had bullied Charlie. I’d imagined that one of the mothers might have contacted me to say sorry or to talk over what had happened, but no one ever had.

‘Sorry to bother you, but can I have a word with Suzie, please?’

‘What do you want her for?’

‘Charlie’s disappeared and I wondered if Suzie could help me.’

Suzie’s mother didn’t step back to let me in, but stayed solidly in the doorway. ‘Why would she know?’ she asked.

Would I react like this, I thought, if Suzie had gone missing, with an aggrieved sense of my own blamelessness? I hoped not. I hoped I would lay aside all hostility and help in whatever way I could. ‘Is she there?’

‘She went out,’ said Suzie’s mother.

‘Where?’

Even as I asked, we both saw Suzie meandering along the road towards us, and by her side an equally stringy and unhasty boy, carrying her bag.

‘Suzie,’ I said, as she came towards us. ‘Can I have a quick word? It’s about Charlie.’

Suzie stared at me as if she couldn’t understand anything I was saying to her. The lanky youth shifted his weight from foot to foot.

‘It’s getting cold,’ said her mother. ‘You’d better come into the hall.’

So the four of us stood wedged together in the narrow hallway, among the wellington boots and coats.

‘Charlie’s disappeared,’ I said again. ‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘About how she was last night. Whether anything happened to upset her.’

Suzie shrugged. ‘She was fine.’

‘So, nothing at all happened?’

‘Don’t think so.’ She slid her ironic smile across to the youth and he smiled back.

‘Tam and Jenna said –’

‘You’ve been to see them and now you’re here too?’ said the mother. She peeled off her washing-up gloves as if she was preparing for a fight. ‘Why? Did they say something I should know about?’

‘Not at all, they couldn’t really help, but –’

‘They couldn’t help but you come here making all your old accusations about Suzie. I know there was a falling-out last term, but you can’t go around making out that your daughter’s a victim and mine’s a bully. I’ve had enough.’

‘I don’t care what happened last term, I’m just trying to find my daughter.’ I drew a deep breath. ‘She’s run away.’

‘Run away? That’s different from going missing, isn’t it?’

‘I –’

‘If you ask me, you’re trying to shift responsibility for this from where it should be on to my daughter. And we all know where it should be.’

I turned away from her and tried to meet Suzie’s gaze. ‘Please, Suzie,’ I said. ‘Something happened, didn’t it? I’m not trying to get you into trouble, I just have to find Charlie. Please.’

For a tiny moment, she looked at me. She half opened her mouth to speak.

‘Out,’ said her mother. ‘And don’t come bothering us again, do you hear?’

Suzie took the boy’s hand and said to him, ‘Let’s go to my room, shall we?’

The door slammed.

Sludge lay under the kitchen table covered in the sticky estuary mud, so I knew Renata and Jackson were back, and I called to them as I checked for messages on the answering-machine. There was only one, from Rory, saying, ‘Hello, hello,
hello
. Nina! Will you pick up?’

‘Jackson’s crying in his room,’ said Renata, as she came down the stairs.

I went to find him. He was sitting on his bed, still in his jacket and boots, which had left muddy tracks across the carpet, and tears were streaked down his flushed cheeks, like snail tracks. He looked thoroughly forlorn and suddenly much younger than eleven. I picked up his cold hands and blew on them to warm them. ‘I’m so sorry about all of this,’ I said.

I told him about the police coming to the house, about Charlie’s missing things, the washbag and makeup bag, nightshirt and purse, and the inescapable conclusion that she had chosen to run away, although I had no idea why. I put my arm round his tense shoulders, pulled him close to me and said it was rotten for him that we were missing going to Florida, but that we would go, I promised, as soon as everything was sorted. Which I was sure would be very soon. I said that for a while – until Charlie was found – I was going to be busy. I told him I was relying on him to help me.

I said all these things – I heard my calm, authoritative
voice, speaking whole sentences, and saw myself as I stroked his dark hair back from his forehead – but only a tiny part of me was there with my son. My brain was like a well-occupied household, activity taking place simultaneously in each of its many rooms. I was thinking about what I should do next. I was making lists and running through options. I was trying to look back over the past days and weeks to find anything, a single word or an overheard scrap of a conversation, that might lead me in the right direction. I was looking at the digital watch strapped to Jackson’s wrist and trying to work out exactly how many minutes Charlie had been missing. I put my hands on Jackson’s shoulders and thought about Charlie; I looked into Jackson’s eyes and saw Charlie looking back; I talked to Jackson and called out to Charlie –
just come home
.

‘So what shall I do to help?’ he asked, in a wobbly voice.

‘Think,’ I said. I kissed his forehead. ‘Think of anything she said to you. Anything you heard her say to anyone else.’ I hesitated for a second. ‘Anything your dad said to her, or she said about him to you, for instance.’

‘Dad? Why Dad?’

‘No real reason.’

‘And that’s all I can do, just think?’

‘For now,’ I said. ‘And don’t use the phone in case she’s trying to call.’

I left him. Downstairs Renata was back at the clearing-up.

I could hear the chink of glasses, the busy tapping of her feet across the tiles, cupboard doors opening and closing. Sludge gave one short bark, and for a jolt of a second I thought perhaps she was barking because Charlie was there, but then the knowledge that she wasn’t flooded through me and left
me shaky and cold. I stood at the top of the stairs, my hand on the banisters, and felt suspended in an eerie sadness. Then I turned sharply and went into Charlie’s bedroom. I sat on her bed and picked up the clothes that were lying there, pressing my face into the soft folds that smelt of her, a smell I’d recognize anywhere, musky and sweet. I closed my eyes and, for a tiny moment, let myself imagine that she was with me, in the room, that when I looked up she’d be standing there, with her lanky-legged slouch, her dishevelled mane of hair, her bold gaze.

‘Stop it,’ I said, out loud, and stood up.

I prowled round the room once more. I sat at her desk and picked up the notebooks: an English drafting exercise book, a red French book, which she’d only just started; the first page was filled with irregular verbs, accompanied by one of Charlie’s doodlings. She doodles on everything. She’ll sit at breakfast and draw spirals over the headlines of the paper and then absentmindedly ink out the teeth of politicians. She’s defaced my address book. She makes little notes and sketches, which I discover when I open a notepad or pick up my shopping list. Her school books are covered in jaunty little designs or bold, cross-hatched words (on the French exercise book it said ‘Lush’ in thick pink felt tip, which had soaked through to the following pages). When she was little, she used to draw stick men and women running along the wallpaper above our bed, or trail indelible pens along the sofas and armchairs. Lately, she had taken to drawing on herself. Her palms have beautiful symmetrical patterns on them, which soften and spread in the heat. She drew tattoos on her arms and thighs and little cartoon smily faces on her toes.

I picked up the uneven piles of school papers. There was
her GCSE coursework on
Great Expectations
, an essay in French about the places she liked to go on holiday, which ended, I saw with a wince, on a reference to being about to go to Florida. She’d put that in, I knew, to show off her use of the future tense. Would you have written about going to Florida, if you weren’t planning to go? Stop that, Nina. I looked elsewhere. There was a graph that showed how quickly something dissolved in something else, a rough draft of a piece she’d written about the history of Sandling Island, which was edged with an intricate mosaic in different colours. There was a messy sheet of algebraic workings-out, a piece of paper with several CD titles written on it, a recipe in pencil for stuffed tomatoes (with a drawing of a tomato underneath it). There was a white envelope with her name written on it, and inside a thin piece of paper, which I drew out. ‘Remember what Pete Doherty says…’ Was that from a boy? A girl?

There was a notebook, which turned out to be full of scraps of messages, presumably passed round during classes. ‘Give me some chewing-gum!’ it said. ‘I’m bored,’ and ‘Can u come tonite?’ Then another spiral-bound notebook, which was empty except for the first couple of pages. There was a sketchily drawn picture of a face, gender unclear, with a sharp nose and a mass of scribbled-in hair, and underneath it, in Charlie’s madcap scrawl: ‘I think he likes me!’

I flipped over the pages, and this time she had written: ‘I
know
he likes me.’ And ‘I think I’ll wear my pink skirt.’ Then just a few scrawls, meaningless insignia, as if she had been trying out a new pen, and then, just a line that zigzagged down the page, and her own name, written in elaborate Gothic script.

I put down the notebook and pulled open Charlie’s drawers, which were crammed full of lined and blank paper, notepads, old homework diaries, playing-cards, postcards, bits of wrapping paper, loose pens and pencils, cartridges for her printer. And then I found an elaborate doodle, which, on closer inspection, seemed to be made out of interlaced letter Js.

It reminded me of something. I flicked back through the last notebook until I got to the page I was looking for. ‘I think I’ll wear my pink skirt.’ And those swirling inscriptions. They weren’t just meaningless scrawls after all.

I phoned Ashleigh.

‘Has she turned up?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Who’s J?’

‘What?’

‘I’m desperate,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking through some of Charlie’s stuff and I saw the letter J written several times. I don’t know if it means anything.’

There was a silence. It was all about tactics. I could threaten Ashleigh, but that might make her clam up altogether. I could plead, bargain. Or just be straightforward.

‘Ashleigh,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to be cross with anybody about this, not with Charlie, not with you. Maybe all of this is nothing. But I need to know that she’s safe. And maybe it isn’t nothing. What I mean is that if you know anything you really ought to tell me. Just in case.’

Another silence.

‘Ashleigh?’

‘He’s a friend.’

‘Who?’

‘Jay.’

‘What does it stand for?’

‘No,’ said Ashleigh. ‘That’s his name. J–A–Y.’

‘Who is he? A boyfriend?’

Another pause. It felt as if Ashleigh was sitting there with a lawyer at her ear, advising her to say as little as possible, no more than was specifically asked for and nothing that might incriminate her. Didn’t she realize that we were talking about my daughter and her best friend?

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t really… He’s a friend.’

‘Where can I reach him?’

‘I don’t know his number.’

‘What’s his second name? Where does he live?’

Another pause.

‘Birche. His dad’s a farmer. The one over near that big old empty building.’

‘The Malting?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is there any chance she might be with him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did she talk about Jay when you spoke to her yesterday?’

‘Not really. You know.’

This was becoming ridiculous. I couldn’t tell whether Ashleigh was being so reluctant and generally uncommunicative because she had something to hide or because she was fifteen years old. I told her I’d be back in touch and rang off. I tried to think if I might know any friends of the Birche family but nobody sprang to mind. As far as I knew there weren’t more than a couple of farms on the island and the farmers were in a different social league from most other people. They didn’t send their children to the local schools. If you were going to meet them, it would probably be at the tennis or golf club or riding with the local mainland hunt.
Clearly it would have to be a cold call. I found the number in the phone book and dialled it, feeling like a double-glazing salesman. A man answered.

‘Is that Mr Birche?’ I said.

‘Who’s that?’ the voice said abruptly, as if he was shouting at me across the island with a megaphone.