Two Fridays in April (22 page)

The bed is softer than she would like. The pillows have not been filled with feathers. There is a shower but no bath in the en-suite, and the shower gel, in a dispenser that’s attached to the wall of the shower stall, smells medicinal. Running across the toilet, wrapped around both lid and seat, is a paper strip that reads
Sealed after cleaning for your peace of mind
.

‘Two nights,’ she told the man behind the reception desk, and gave him her credit card to swipe. Sixty-seven euro a night, practically an entire week’s salary to spend her weekend in that sad little room.

She hangs two of her dresses in the wardrobe, stows shoes underneath. She sets her toilet bag on the shelf above the
bathroom basin, props her toothbrush in the water glass. Someone pushes a cart, or pulls a suitcase, along the corridor outside; the wheels rumble past her door and fade away.

She stands at the window and looks down at the street, four floors below. She watches cars sweep by, their headlights making the wet road glisten briefly. She hears the shrill two-note song of a fire engine, or is it an ambulance? She sees a group emerge from the hotel, six or eight of them. One couple breaks away – waves, calls – the rest head off in the opposite direction.

It occurs to her that nobody at all knows where she is, not a single person in the world, apart from the man who checked her in. She thinks of her passport, in a side pocket of one of her cases. She could fly away – she could simply disappear. Go somewhere with a kind climate, live gently by the sea.

Phyllis would be cross when she didn’t show up for work on Monday morning; Daphne would wonder where she was at lunchtime. Alex would no doubt find a way to divorce her, with or without her co-operation. There’d be talk among the neighbours when it became apparent that she was gone for good: Pat of the coffee morning would earn some notoriety by being the last person in the neighbourhood to speak to her.

By and large, depressingly few lives would be disrupted if she never appeared again.

She turns from the window. Enough of this self-pity: she’ll make coffee, read her book for a while – but suddenly she can’t bear the idea of spending another minute in this sad little room. She takes her handbag from the bed and finds her lipstick. She’ll go downstairs, get herself a proper coffee in the bar. Get used to being on her own again.

The lift doors whoosh open. Three people stand inside. Two adult females – mother and daughter, have to be – and a tall moustachioed man in a raincoat and trilby hat. Isobel gives a general nod and steps inside. The doors slide towards one another and they descend to the ground floor in silence.

Someone is wearing Chanel No 5. The older woman wheezes gently with every inhalation. The man clears his throat. Isobel feels his eyes on the back of her head. The lift stops at the second floor, the doors slide open but nobody is waiting. They stand unmoving as the seconds tick by, before the man reaches forward to extend his arm past Isobel – ‘excuse me,’ he murmurs – to jab a button once, twice. The doors close and off they go again.

The younger woman leans in to say something in a low voice to the older.

‘What?’ At the increased volume of the hard of hearing.

‘The invisible man just got on,’ the other repeats, loudly enough for the others to hear, and the man chuckles.

They reach the ground floor. The doors open again to reveal a bustling lobby, busier than when Isobel was checking in. She skirts several knots of formally dressed people and makes her way to the bar, where more women in party frocks and men in suits are milling about.

She spots an unoccupied barstool and claims it, eventually catching the eye of the lone, harried barman.

‘Is there some function on?’ she enquires.

‘There was a wedding earlier,’ he replies, pouring coffee from a pot. ‘This is the tail end of it.’

She shows him her key and signs the tab, scans the room as
she raises her cup. Yes, a few look like they’ve been here a long time. The stocky man with the pointed shoes, hair tumbled, tie askew; his companion in a red sequined dress that’s too young for her, tipping her head towards him, smile a little lopsided. Another younger group by the window, erupting into uproarious laughter every few seconds.

‘Wasted.’

Isobel turns. A man leans against the counter a few feet away. Forties, average height, average weight. Average everything.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Youth: wasted on the young,’ he says, one side of his mouth turning up, forming a crease in his cheek.

Isobel smiles back. ‘I suppose it is.’

He lifts his glass. Dark amber liquid, half an inch left. Has he been there all the time, or did he move closer when he spotted her?

‘I had a wasted youth,’ he says. ‘Don’t remember half of it.’

‘Maybe that’s just as well.’

He drains the glass – she’s reminded of Alex tipping back his head in exactly the same way earlier – and sets it down gently on the counter. ‘Maybe so,’ he says. ‘Maybe so.’

Her room key sits by her saucer – he can’t have missed it. He’ll offer to buy her a drink, and she’ll say yes. Where’s the harm in it? They’re both adults, and he seems normal. Might go some way towards redeeming an otherwise disastrous day.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘have a nice evening.’ He raises a hand in farewell and walks off. She watches him go, home to a wife probably. Not looking for company, or anything else, after all.

She sits on her stool and sips coffee. Alex will be home by
now, watching something worthy on television, or poring over whatever case he’s working on. George might be home too, his show surely over at the school – but maybe he was heading out for an end-of-term drink afterwards with the rest of the staff.

At some point, tonight or tomorrow, he will ask his father where she is. She wonders what Alex will tell him, how much of the truth he’ll choose to reveal. She hopes George won’t turn against her, won’t think badly of her. She wonders about ringing him in a few days; she wouldn’t want to put him in an awkward position.

Nobody else approaches her, she talks to nobody. As she finishes her coffee the barman approaches her with the pot but she shakes her head and slides off the stool: more than enough to keep her awake tonight without an overdose of caffeine. She makes her way through the thinning crowd back to the lift, back to her room on the fourth floor.

She’s brushing her teeth when her phone rings. Alex, she thinks. She drops the brush, spits into the sink, crosses to where the phone sits charging by the bed.

It’s Jack. She looks at his name in surprise. She checks her watch: nearly ten.

What could he want at this hour? She feels a slither of anxiety as she picks up the phone, remembering his call to tell her of Finn’s death.

She sits on the bed, presses the answer key. ‘Jack,’ she says.

‘It’s Una,’ he says, without preamble. ‘She’s missing. She’s been gone all day but we didn’t realise till a little while ago. I thought we should let you know. I’m at Daphne’s. I’m just going out to look for her.’

‘Have you called the guards?’

‘Daphne’s doing it now.’

‘I’m coming over,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘Tell Daphne I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell her I’m coming.’

Her child needs her. She takes her car key from the dressing table, energy flooding back into her.

‘T
hanks,’ she says, getting out, slinging her rucksack across a shoulder. ‘See you later.’

She doesn’t look back. She never looks back. She hears Daphne’s car idling at the kerb as she walks off – why does she always hang around, why doesn’t she just
go
? Una can feel her watching, pretending to everyone that she can’t bear to part with her precious stepdaughter.

She works her way through the knots of chattering, jostling, flirting people in the yard, hoping not to be spotted by anyone,
praying for her name not to be shouted. Better if she escapes notice this morning, better that way.

She reaches the side of the building and keeps going around to the back, making for the sports field. If anyone meets her now she’s looking for her glasses, or maybe her locker key, which she lost there yesterday.

Behind the equipment shed she kicks off her shoes, pulls off her jacket and jumper and unbuttons her shirt, shivering as the chilly air hits her skin. She opens her rucksack and rummages around until she finds the top that Daphne got her. She shakes the creases out of it.

It’s the blue of the lapis lazuli bracelet Ciara gave her last Christmas. She recognises the brand – it wasn’t cheap. Three green buttons at the neck, three-quarter-length sleeves that end with a thin green band. She has to admit she likes it. She pulls it over her head, feels its softness as it slides down.

She upends the rucksack. Books and more clothes topple onto the grass. She hurriedly gets into her sweatshirt and jeans, slips her feet back into her school shoes. She gathers the books together and packs them up again, stuffs her uniform in on top.

She transfers Daphne’s tenner from her jacket to her wallet.
Get an ice-cream
, she said, as if Una was a child. She’ll buy him flowers with it. She’ll spend every bit of it on flowers. She pats her other pocket to make sure her phone is still there.

She hoists the rucksack over a shoulder again and begins making her way along the sports field, half walking, half running along the grass, keeping well in to the edge but still feeling horribly conspicuous, with so many windows overlooking the
field. She’s alert for the sound of a whistle or a shout – not that she’d respond, she’d just speed up – but she hears neither. Looks like she’s getting away with it.

She reaches the far end of the field and stands panting before the old stone wall that borders it. She hitches her rucksack over both shoulders and regards the wall. It’s nearly twice her height, she reckons about ten feet, but she’s often seen boys clambering over it. Can’t be that hard.

She grips a jutting rock, searches for another to grab onto. Her fingers are frozen – why didn’t she bring gloves? She clambers up a few feet before losing her hold and slithering back down, grazing the heel of one hand painfully. She swears and rubs her hand hard until the stinging lessens, and then she tries again.

Her second attempt is better. She gets almost to the top before her foot slips, and again she plummets to the ground, banging her chin on the way and landing on her back with a thump that knocks the breath out of her.

She sits on the ground and waits till her heart has stopped slapping like a fish inside her. She feels her chin gingerly: it’s sore, but there’s no blood. She doesn’t think any real damage is done.

She’d be better able to climb without the rucksack – but flinging it over the wall is easier said than done. After four failed attempts she opens it, takes out the books and flings them over, one by one. The lighter rucksack finally follows: she hears it land with a distant thud on the other side of the wall. She hasn’t a clue what’s there – hopefully not someone’s back garden with a big dog in it.

She brushes grit from her hands and launches another assault on the wall – and this time she gets to the top, despite a heart-stopping moment halfway up when a foot slithers and she almost loses her grip. She straddles the wall to catch her breath, looking down at the laneway where her splayed books and rucksack are lying. Good job it’s not raining. At the other side of the lane is another wall, a couple of feet lower than the one she’s on, and beyond that the back gardens of a row of semi-detached houses.

A woman is hanging clothes on a line, no more than twenty feet away: Una would be clearly visible to her if she were to turn her head a few inches to the right. Una leans forward slowly until her upper body is resting on the top of the wall, her face turned towards the garden, and waits.

The woman bends to take a shirt from the laundry basket and shakes it out: the damp cotton snaps loudly. A spider darts across the top of the wall, inches from Una’s face: she squeezes her eyes closed, trying not to imagine it crawling into her ear.

Eventually – three minutes? Ten? – the woman lifts the empty laundry basket and goes back inside. As soon as she hears the door close, Una sits up. She eases her other leg over the top of the wall and, grabbing onto what she can along the way, she slithers to the ground, bringing dust, grit and a few woodlice with her.

She brushes herself down rapidly, flings the books back into her rucksack and flies down the lane, her injured hand and chin still smarting, the chill of the day forgotten with the adrenalin that’s galloping around inside her.

When she reaches the end she stops, out of breath again.
She’s on familiar territory now, the school to the right and her destination the other way.

She hears the drone of an engine in the sky and looks up. It’s a small plane trailing a banner that reads
Congratulations Charlotte and Brian
. She hadn’t known they were planning to do that. She wonders whose idea it was, and how much it cost.

She tucks her hair into the hood of her sweatshirt and walks on. A few people pass by, nobody taking any notice of her. After a few minutes she increases her pace, the cold biting at her face now. She checks the time: Daphne will have got to work.