Then You Were Gone (19 page)

Jazzy nodded dismissively, trying not to think about the fact that he would be unable to go about the basics of paying his own electricity bill if his life depended on it.

‘But what I did find,’ she proffered the paper from the back of her trousers again, ‘was this!’

‘OK, brilliant, congratulations. Are you going to finally tell me what it is then?’

‘Go on,’ she urged Jazzy once more to take the paper from her and once more he demurred. ‘OK, fine, I’ll tell you. It’s a letter to Keith from someone called Maria Novak, and it’s all about a girl called Jessica.’

Chapter Nineteen

There were a handful of minicabs waiting outside Northallerton station, as there usually were to meet the London train. Simone climbed into one and gave the driver her sister’s address. Even as desperate as she was for some comfort and warmth, for the embrace of someone who loved her, Simone knew she could not make her lie to Jazzy true and go to her parents’ house. She had never told them anything about Mack, not yet hinted that there might be a new and important someone in her life. They would, she knew, profess hurt and surprise that they had not been informed, and would ask hundreds of probing, insulting questions about Mack, trying to find ways to demonstrate that he was not, and never could be, the match of the son-in-law they never had; Jed. Simone phoned her sister, Louise, from the back seat.

‘Lou? It’s me.’

Louise did not sound particularly surprised to hear from Simone – the two of them spoke at least weekly and sometimes more – but nor did she sound particularly pleased. Simone remembered that it was after nine o’clock at night. Why did she keep disturbing people who had young children at a time when their minds were sure to be turning to a quick episode of Lewis and a small glass of wine? (Or, in her sister’s case, more likely a crafty fag in the back yard behind the bins where nobody could spot her.)

‘I’m – um, I’m in Northallerton, at the station. My train’s been cancelled and I wondered if I could stay the night at your place?’

‘Oh – er, OK. I mean, sure. But what’s going on? What were you doing on a train up here anyway? Why aren’t you at work?’

‘Lou, it’s… listen, it’s a long story, I promise that I’ll tell you it all when I get there. Are you sure it’s OK for me to stay? I’ll be gone first thing in the morning.’

‘Of course,’ Louise said, and to Simone’s relief she really did sound as though she meant it.

Louise’s house was on a 1970s estate on the edge of Seeley, a three-bed semi, overheated, overstuffed with furniture and toys, and smelling of sausages. Simone did not think she had ever been so glad to walk over any threshold. Louise’s house was emphatically not the kind of place where anything bad could happen.

‘The kids are in bed,’ Louise said as greeting, with a double thumbs-up gesture, ‘and Danny’s on nights, so we’ve got the place to ourselves if you fancy a quick glass of wine before bed?’ Louise’s husband was a nurse at the local hospital and kept unsocial hours. This suited him as he was, in Simone’s opinion, quite an unsocial person. She assumed Danny must have married Louise so that she could do all his talking for him for the rest of his life.

‘I’d love one,’ Simone said.

‘I’ve got gin, if you’d rather? Or a quick smoke?’ She tapped her head towards a drawer in which Simone knew she kept a tin containing a few pre-rolled joints for when everything got a bit much. ‘You look like you could use it?’

For a moment, a quick trip on the oblivion express seemed pretty tempting, but then she remembered that she needed to be on the first train south in the morning, and with a clear head. This time here, with the person she loved most, the only person she knew who would stop a bullet for her, was nothing but temporary respite. ‘Wine’s fine, thanks.’

‘So?’ Louise said as she sat down with two full-to-the-brim goblets of red. ‘Tell me what’s going on then – what are you doing up here?’

Simone tried to start at the beginning, to make her story sound logical and measured and like something that made sense. Because nothing about it made any sense to her any more, and she hoped that by telling it to someone else, then some of the pieces might start to fall into place.

She had told Louise about Mack after the first time they had met at Jazzy’s wedding, how she had been wary of him at first and he had managed to surprise her by turning out to be far less of a dick than he had first appeared. The first thing she had thought when she met him, before he had even finished introducing himself, was,
That man is far too fond of himself
. She had heard a lot about him from Jazzy – the legendary Mack, south London to his bones despite his name, the handsome, edgy charmer for whom the word ‘player’ could have been coined. Jazzy would tell stories of the two of them in Japan, of how Mack would always get them out of scrapes with a flash of his smile and a twinkle of his blue eyes. He sounded, Simone had thought in her more unkind moments, like another one of Jazzy’s working class mascots, the people with whom he liked to surround himself, their humble origins and amusing accents proof of Jazzy’s own man of the people credentials.

Before she and Mack started talking she had already decided that he would be the type of man who would respond to any topic of conversation she tried to bring up by saying, ‘You see, the interesting thing about that is…’

But, as it turned out, he had not. He asked her about herself, listened without interrupting, asked questions that proved he had actually been paying attention, and only talked about himself when prompted. She had still been reluctant, however, to revise her initial assessment of him. In her experience a man as good looking as Mack was always a little bit too fond of himself.

Even in the months that followed, as they courted each other cautiously, as though they were both afraid that were they to take a first tentative step over the boundary into a real relationship they might find themselves lost forever, Simone still did not revise her initial opinion. Mack was indeed fond of himself, and far too much so. The sheen of confidence, the twinkly, winky charm, was not a persona or a pretence. That really was Mack. But that was not everything about Mack, and she had told Louise this too once she had begun to realise that there was something about this man that might be able to sustain her interest, that might allow her to give in and allow him to make her feel something.

‘You’d like him, Lou,’ she had told her over the phone one rainy Sunday. ‘In fact, you’d love him. I mean, everyone loves him, he’d charm the knickers off a nun, but
you’d
really love him. He’d get you, and you’d get him.’

‘Does he get you?’ Louise had asked, in a tone that suggested not many people ever managed to truly understand what lay behind Simone’s appealingly disorganised and quirkily attractive façade.

‘Yes,’ Simone said quietly. ‘He really does.’

‘Mack’s gone,’ she said now, and she could tell by her sister’s pained but unsurprised expression that at first she thought Simone meant that the relationship had ended, that what they were dealing with here was nothing more serious than a broken heart.

‘No,’ Simone said, ‘he’s disappeared. He’s missing.’ She told Louise about the ‘I love you’ text, the subsequent dead air, the letter, the birth certificate in his flat, the whole other set of forged identity papers bought for a teenage girl, the man at Rory’s nursery, the man, presumably the same man, on the train, Keith, the Russian wedding dresses, and her eventual but inexplicable conviction that whatever Mack was running from, it was not Keith. Part-way through the telling, she became aware that she was trying hard to make the story sound plausible, as though apologetically recounting the plot of a straight-to-DVD film, as though these were all things that were happening to someone else.

Her sister had moved from the armchair to sit beside her as she talked, and once she had reached the part where she jumped from the train and headed here, Louise put an arm around her and pulled Simone’s head so that it rested on her shoulder. ‘Jesus Christ, mate. Only you could finally meet the perfect bloke, finally let yourself fall in love with him, only for him to disappear on you and turn out to be some sort of people smuggler or something.’

‘He’s not,’ Simone said sharply. ‘That’s not what I think’s happened.’ It wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

‘Sorry,’ Louise said, all the levity in her tone gone. ‘I know, I shouldn’t have made a joke about it.’

For the first time since she read Mack’s letter, Simone took a breath and let herself cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sniffed, ‘I just… I just miss him. I wish he was here, I wish you could meet him, I wish he was here to help me with all this, but,’ she sniffed again, ‘that’s just stupid because if he was here then there’d be nothing for him to help me with. I just don’t know what else to do, Louise, and I’m starting to get scared.’

‘Scared about what’s happening?’ Louise asked quietly, ‘or scared about how you feel about Mack?’

‘Both,’ Simone admitted, and collapsed into more sobs. This, she realised, was the truth of it; this was why she was so upset, this was the thing that was terrifying her the most. She could handle the rest of it; whatever it was that Mack was afraid of, she felt able to confront, just as long as she had him with her again. She had not been intimidated by the gormless, sausage-eared thug on the train, she had already travelled the length of the country and halfway back again, hanging around country lanes in the dark and the cold, knocking on strangers’ doors late at night. None of that scared her any more, and she would do it all again ten times over if only it meant she got to see Mack’s face again, hold his large, strong but amusingly smoothly-manicured hands, smell the clean, fresh scent of him as she buried her face in his shoulder. But knowing that she would go through all that for another person, gladly and willingly, had made her vulnerable, and that was one thing she had sworn to herself she would never be again.

‘Does he know?’ Louise asked as Simone’s sobs began to quieten, and Simone knew what she meant.

‘About Jed?’ Simone shook her head. ‘No.’ She shrugged. ‘I would have told him – I will tell him, one day,’ she added more hopefully. ‘But it was like I didn’t need to really. Not this time. It was like finally it didn’t matter any more. You know?’

Louise did not respond and after a moment Simone looked up to see her sister regarding her levelly, her mouth set in a straight line. ‘Yes,’ Louise said, her eyes shining a little. ‘I do know. I always knew this could happen for you – that someone would be able to completely bowl you over to the point where you were more scared of not being with them than of being with them. But I’ve got to say…’ she shrugged apologetically, ‘these last few years, I’ve been starting to wonder if it was ever going to happen.’

Simone sniffed a pathetic laugh and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. ‘You’d given up on me?’

Louise smiled. ‘I’d never give up on you. But I was starting to worry that he – that that
bastard
– had managed it, that he’d done what he’d always intended and made sure that you never looked at another man for the rest of your life, even if it meant he didn’t get to have you either.’

Simone shivered, despite the warmth of the cosy room. The ice in Louise’s tone that was there whenever she talked about Jed, shot straight to Simone’s core, reawakening the nerve endings that had been rubbed raw during the time she had been Jed’s girlfriend. Jed had been Simone’s first boyfriend and, at least until Mack, he had pretty much been the last one worthy of the name. She had been sixteen when he first kissed her in a pub in the market square, he three years older than her and already with a job at an estate agents and a flat above the Co-op and his own car. He had been incredibly handsome – still was by all accounts – well-dressed, articulate, charming. He was a fully-formed, freewheeling adult set against Simone’s suffocating world of school uniform and homework diaries and cider on a park bench. He drove her to York and Leeds for nights in smoky clubs with live bands, or dinner in Thai restaurants or foreign language films in little cinemas with their own wine bar attached. He bought her new clothes that would have cost her a month’s wages from her babysitting and waitressing jobs. And he was the coldest, cruellest, most terrifyingly unhinged person that Simone had ever encountered, before or since.

He would buy her the new clothes that he had chosen for her, then the day after she had worn them on one of their dates she would find them cut to rags on the bedroom floor after she had purportedly ‘flirted’ with a bar tender or cinema usher. Flirting, in Jed’s mind, could consist of anything from smiling at a man who was not Jed, to allowing a man who was not Jed to hold a door open for her. Once a man – an old man, or so he had seemed to Simone at the time, although probably he had been about forty – had picked up some change she had dropped on the floor and handed it to her. Simone had been careful to avoid direct eye contact with the man, and she had made sure not to smile at him, but she had thanked him, quietly and in a monotone. On their way home that night, Jed had stopped the car five miles out of town at a farm gate on an unlit minor road and pushed her out of the car then driven off at speed. Muddy, freezing and numb with fear, she had walked home to her parents’ house, knowing that she had brought it on herself by speaking to that man when she had known all along what kind of mood Jed had been in that evening.

Her parents had been in bed by the time she got home, but she had known by then that they would not have helped her. They liked Jed, and seemed entirely taken in by his slick, attentive charm. Louise’s teenage years had been turbulent and stressful for their quiet, unworldly parents. Louise was a born rebel who smoked her first cigarette at twelve and got drunk for the first time at fourteen. Simone knew, because everyone in the whole school knew, and also because Louise had told her, that Louise had had sex with one of the upper sixth boys when she had just turned fifteen, and had been with a different boy every week from then onwards. Their parents were just glad that, now Louise had finally begun to calm down, Simone had managed to find a steady boyfriend with a car and the kind of job that meant he wore a tie, and who wiped his feet when he came in, and called them “Mr and Mrs Osborne” until they asked him to stop. Louise, on the other hand, had been in the same year as Jed at school, and remembered him as the worst kind of bully, the kind that got good marks and behaved impeccably in front of teachers, but who had an unerring instinct for singling out the weakest to be on the receiving end of his calculated cruelty.