They don’t say much of anything for the remaining five minutes. Perhaps each is thinking of the kidnapper, some career criminal in Border Patrol, perhaps not. Perhaps they’re both thinking how close to the truth they got with Max. But they just sit there, two solid weights opposite each other, separated by a screen, but, otherwise, just as before. They have shared a space a thousand times, a tent, a car, a sofa. Companionable silence. Simone is grateful for it.
‘Save the day?’ Lucy says, just as she stands to leave.
‘How?’
‘I’m going to sing at the top of my lungs on the way home – the Uber driver can stuff it,’ she tells her. ‘I’m going to sing … what’s the cheesiest song you can think of?’
‘Uh …’ Simone pauses, a hand to the phone, then stands, puts it to the glass the way she did in the coach way back when, to Mexico.Don’t go, she is thinking, the same refrain as always, a minor chord set for the song of motherhood.I’ve let you go, it’s the right thing to do, but please don’t leave me.It’s exaggerated, for Simone, the separation, but it’s still natural, too, to reach this point: the empty nest. Hers is a jail cell, that’s all.
‘The cheesiest, most rubbish song,’ Lucy says, and she comes towards the glass screen, too, matching her palm to Simone’s. Both leave sweaty smears – the heat of jail and the nervous energy of hundreds of inmates. ‘“MMMBop”,’ Lucy eventually says, and Simone breaks into a smile.
‘Deal. I’ll sing “MMMBop” in my cell.’
‘You’ll be in the green overalls before you know it.’
CHAPTER 73
The Kidnapper
Outside the house again, the next morning, and itwasthe right one. I knew it was. Found through chance or, actually, through hard work and stone-cold obsession. I didn’t know if it was, for so long, but now I do. Because here I am, holding a piece of paper containing confirmation it is her.
I have the rope and the tape, and am standing here, the daughter out, even though it’s the morning. I missed her again, even though I got up in the middle of the night to come.
I walk to the front door, cold in a skirt, the heat having left the day, and I think I’m going to have to break in, but there’s a spare key on the ledge above the door.
It’s easy. It’s so easy to sneak in, to feel my way into the still dark morning hallway, which smells of coffee and girls’ shampoo, and wait. I cast about, looking for a good place. Dark-wood stairs with a striped runner on them. A hall table collecting post. Kitchen at the back, two bedrooms off to the side. And, next to one of them, a storage cupboard, warm from a boiler. I get in there, next to the towels and the bedding, and I wait for her to come home.
CHAPTER 74
Simone
It’s the day of Simone’s arraignment, which is at two o’clock. She wakes up with curdled guts, has diarrhoea immediately on the aeroplane toilet the second her eyes open. The cell smells bad afterwards. She tells herself later, as she showers under a tepid communal water spout, that twenty or forty are just the same, really. That no one can count down twenty years. But she doesn’t believe it.
Visiting hours at ten o’clock, and today is Lucy’s day, not Damien’s: Lucy negotiated two days to his one, said she needed to see Simone more than he did. Simone still has wet hair as she walks down to – today – the main Visitors’ Centre.
Well, good. There will be no screen separating them, no phone handset to speak into. They aren’t permitted to touch, but they are permitted to just be, across a table from one another. Simone can close her eyes and pretend it’s someplace else. It doesn’t smell or feel like home, but it feels like something. A meeting place. An exam hall. Not a jail, not necessarily, jumpsuit notwithstanding. Besides, she can’t see herself. She sits on her hands, to hide the striped fabric from herself, and looks, instead, at the empty chair in front of her.
Lucy isn’t there yet, but Simone is distracted momentarily by what she is quite sure is a drugs exchange. A visitor, female, messing with something in the palm of her hand. Both visitorand prisoner have their eyes on it; it’s so obvious, and Simone wonders if she would always have known this or if this has come from some awful forced life experience.Maybe it isn’t drugs, she tells herself. Maybe she only thinks it is because she herself carried drugs. She loses sleep, sometimes, about where those brown-paper bars went, and whose lives they affected. Did the police take them, or …?
Lucy is late. Or Lucy isn’t here yet. Simone looks at the clock. It’s five past ten, then ten past. Lucy’s never once been late. This is the last chance for Simone to see her in this jail before she is sentenced, moved elsewhere, and everything begins from there, a water wheel that gets going slowly and then races. Lucy will move back to England eventually. They will keep in touch by letter. And, after that, just time.
Maybe it was Damien’s turn? Or Lucy thought it was, mistaken?
No. They had said.
And an eerie feeling settles across her. Maybe it’s just that she’s cold, hair wet against her neck from the shower. Maybe she’s getting sick. But it feels like something else: that ever-present ubiquitous thing. Maternal instinct.
Where is she?
Quarter past ten, twenty past. Soon, she has been sitting there for a full hour, and visiting time is over. Nobody checks in with her, or says anything, and so Simone leaves reluctantly at eleven, walking past the friendly guard who told her about Moody. ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Is there any way I can make a call?’
‘No,’ he answers, as simple as that. ‘Not until telephone night.’ This is how things are referred to in jail: pizza night, telephone night, visiting hours, yard time. Things that don’t need names are given names, nominalized, to participate in the farce that structure can be created out of wasted lives.
‘No – it’s just, my daughter didn’t show, and …’
‘Whatever the reason, if I let you, I have to let everyone, and then my life is hell,’ he says, the jaded tone of voice of somebody on the receiving end of unreasonable requests all the time.
‘Well, can you get a message to someone?’ she asks him. ‘It’s urgent.’
