Wide, flat highways become dotted with the unreality of floodlights, official-looking buildings and gantries. Traffic filters off into designated lanes and locations, and Simone watches, blinking in the sudden glare, trying to glean whatever information she can; her outbound trip is less loaded than inbound, and she needs to use it to learn what she can about the crossings.
They join a queue along a suspended freeway. It’s busy, even though it’s night-time. At their booth there are three Border Patrol officers who sit in hatches, checking passports. Two of the three vehicles in front of them are pulled awayfrom the road and searched; each takes less than five minutes, and all Simone can see is an officer getting on and then off and thinks about her odds: 66.6 per cent.
Eventually, their coach reaches the hatch, their driver says something in a low voice, and they are pulled over, too, off the freeway and into a side road.
Simone cannot –cannot– comprehend that on the way back she will have something illegal with her. And maybe the security will be different coming from Mexico into America. Maybe it will be worse. Maybe it is better not to know.
It’s certainly easier not to think about it now. About the fact that it might be drugs. About what drugs mean to her.
‘All tourists?’ one of the Border Patrol officers says, walking up the three steps at the front of the coach. Simone wilts like a dead flower at the back, trying to turn invisible, then has to forcefully stop herself.No. Act naturally. Don’t arouse suspicion now, long before you’re actually suspicious. She briefly wonders if she has yet committed a crime, and she tells herself that she hasn’t. There’s something good about that, something edifying. Like proof she hasn’t changed.
‘Yes,’ the coach driver says, a man wearing sunglasses even though it’s dark.
‘Passports,’ the officer says, then walks down the aisle slowly, Simone trembles and shows hers. She can hear every minute thing happening. The hum of the fan in the tiny toilet. The officer’s boots sticking on linoleum.
She holds her passport out, and he flicks his gaze to hers, eye contact fleeting. He nods, turns and departs, and that’s all. That’s all. If the luggage bay at the rear of the coach was searched, she doesn’t know about it. It was mercifully quick. Maybe she will get away with it. She tries to imagine it: arriving back with whatever is in the bag. Then getting Lucy back. Then leaving Texas, leaving America, and never returning.
The officer leaves. The coach departs again with a squeak of a handbrake. An elderly couple across the aisle from Simone lurch slightly in their seats, unprepared.
Back on to the highway, this time in Mexico. Funny, the day she was taken from her parents by a social worker waiting outside her school kind of felt like this one. Unfamiliar roads, no idea of what’s next.
And that’s that. From one country to another. They leave the brightly lit crossing and head on to a road with no street lights. The coach illuminates a small patch in front of them, but everything else is just darkness. They could be anywhere.
Each seat has a small reading light. They create miniature tableaux of people: normal people. Holidaymakers. Couples. The family, right at the front, with the toddler. Simone’s heart turns over as she looks at them.
Right after her RADA audition, Lucy arrived in their kitchen and put her elbows on the counter, rocking slightly on her feet as though in character. Simone, preparing coffee at a Tassimo machine that Damien had bought her as an extremely misguided Christmas present and which she felt she had to use, watched her, wary; she could tell news of some kind was coming.
‘The singing probably is a real sticking point,’ Lucy said. She dropped her head, then looked right at Simone again.
‘Yeah. But you don’t even want to be a singer.’
‘They have this thing aboutall-rounders.’
‘Like wanting a chef who can chop but also, I don’t know …’ Simone said, distracted by espresso spluttering everywhere.
‘Swallow knives,’ Lucy finished with a laugh.
‘Right!’
‘If they do offer, though,’ she said, her voice slow and low, ‘I think I will probably live here.’
The espresso finished, and, suddenly, the kitchen was silent. Simone perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised, but was.
She didn’t know what to do, so, delight running through her veins, and not wanting to show it, she added cold milk to the espresso.
‘Don’t you want to steam that?’ Lucy said flatly.
‘Because it’s so convenient to stay home?’ she asked her. Dishes was three doors down from RADA. She poured the coffee away, started again.
‘Yes and no,’ Lucy said.
‘Has something happened?’
‘Call it a loss of confidence,’ Lucy said lightly.
Simone watched her daughter closely. She was taking the Tassimo pods and stacking them on the kitchen counter, where they kept toppling.
‘A loss of confidence?’
