‘Just don’t fancy living out. I mean,’ she said, then gestured to their sunlit kitchen: Velux blinds, bifold doors, brass fittings. Their eyes met again, and Simone wonders now if she pretended easily enough. But, beneath that, she wonders why Lucy suddenly wanted to stay so close to home. She’d already chosen a hall of residence at RADA, then intended to cancel it. Simone had asked her a few times for her reasoning. Was it wanting to be close to the restaurant? Was it a preference for their Victorian townhouse, not halls? But now, in the light of everything that’s happened since, it suddenly feels sinister. Lucy wanted to stay close to home: why?
She sits there, knees drawn to her chest, thinking dark thoughts.
She doesn’t sleep but, nevertheless, suddenly it’s 4:02 in the morning. This is the precise time that Lucy was taken, or, at least, Simone thinks so. Motherhood always plays out inthe small hours. Night feeds, waiting up for teenagers, the lot. Now fear flashes over her in fine needles of regret. A betrayal by her. How can she not have woken properly? Lucy won’t have gone quietly, would be harder to kidnap than some people. Would’ve kicked and screamed, Simone is sure of it. Adrenaline fires into her system. Twenty-four hours post. It’s a physical reaction.
The softly rumbling coach jiggles her head to her knees and she lets it, trying to shake the thoughts out.
But, still, the mind won’t let her forget or think nothing. It all plays out, the version where she woke up and stopped it. The version where she told the police.
No, she tells herself.Get a grip. You’re here, and these are the cards you have been dealt. All we can do in life is choose to play them as best as we can.
But, for once, she doesn’t believe it. Something deep and wise is telling her that she cannot just do this one thing and have that be the end of it, but she isn’t ready to listen, can’t, not yet, not yet.
Hour five, six, into Simone’s time on the coach, and something begins to happen. Her body starts to power down. Sleep comes eventually for even those who fight it.
She leans her head back against the window and lets the black scenery whizz by and she thinks of her daughter and how scared she must be. Of her husband, flying solo, terrified. A few tears begin there, alone on a coach in the middle of fucking nowhere, and Simone lets them roll down her face like English raindrops.
CHAPTER 14
Daybreak in Mexico. Simone slept for twenty minutes, but it is the only respite from her mind that she has had since Lucy was taken, and therefore it really, truly does feel like the next day. The sky outside the coach is ballet-shoe pink. It ought to be beautiful, but to Simone it is eerie: Lucy’s captivity is ongoing, Simone’s task still hours ahead of her, the risks mind-boggling.
The scenery has slid from Texan desert to Mexican, which is subtly different. The roads are huge and empty, but old houses have begun to populate them. Now they’re on a tree-lined street, yellow square buildings with flat roofs, old-fashioned cables up ahead that sag like skipping ropes. Graffiti in Spanish, half-finished building works, a playground by the side of the road, pink and yellow slides with their legs in dust.
Simone feels a longing for something she cannot name. Perhaps for home. Perhaps for what this trip is for other people. Perhaps just for Lucy, that feeling of wanting to cup her face. To listen to her. Lucy would look at those sagging phone lines and say, ‘God, I hope that’s not the broadband!’ but she would also find interest, like Simone, in that playground, and the lives that visit it. Simone thinks perhaps this is some coping mechanism, to bring her daughter to mind, to do so repeatedly and obsessively. Lucy would notice this. Lucy would say that. Simone is ashamed to admit that she has spent all summer doing it.
The coach empties them in the centre of Nueva Rosita, an industrial town in North Mexico. Some of the tourists head off to another coach taking them to the tourist sites. Some people stay here, heading into a hotel called Rosa De Oro, to see the history of the mines, the hotels designed to capture the tourists passing through with their pools and spas.
The sky is now a bright blue behind the hotel, four palm trees poking out up over the roof. Simone checks her phone, then the flip phone, then Lucy’s phone. Her limbs are stiff from panic, sitting on a coach and lack of sleep, and she stretches there, in the dreamlike Mexican sun.
She’s several miles from the What Three Words location, and she begins to walk because she doesn’t know what else to do. She could call a taxi, but she wants as little recognizability and involvement from other people as possible. She wants to be alone, at least looking like a tourist if not acting like one. If she hails an Uber there, then takes an Uber back with a bag, she creates a chain of evidence. So far, the only concrete facts are that she entered Mexico and walked. So be it.
She passes palm trees, burnt-out trash cans, warehouses, more palm trees, buildings that look abandoned, graffiti, yet more palm trees and warehouses. On and on she walks, her back hot, her eyes focused on the horizon up ahead, trying to keep her mind blank.
Her phone rings. It’s Damien. He’s landed. Here they are, surreally traversing time and space, barely meeting, their lives intersecting on two phones like a brief kiss. Damien from the UK to New York to Texas. Simone from Texas to Mexico and back, hopefully.
‘Hi,’ she answers, not knowing what else to say.
‘Is she safe? Did you get her?’
Simone pauses. ‘They’ve asked me to do something here,’ she says, hesitating on the detail. She walks along the sideof the road, past petrol stations and plants growing through cracks in concrete, wondering how best to keephimsafe. ‘So I am.’
‘Do what?’ he says.
‘It’s better that you don’t know,’ she says in a low voice. ‘I’m going to be back tonight to meet them and get her. Please don’t do anything until then.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘If this goes wrong, Dame, I … I don’t want you to know,’ she tells him.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he says. ‘Where is Lucy?’
‘The kidnapper has her. He has asked me to complete a task.’ She drops her voice even though she’s totally alone. A pause while Damien takes this in. And then he surprises her. Her husband who finds it easy to forgive. The heat of the dispute has run out.
‘I want to come to you. I’m here. Let me help.’ Worried tones are back in his voice like minor chords, and Simone can’t bear to listen to them.
‘What are you doing?’
‘That really is better not said aloud.’
