One of the officers is absent-mindedly stroking the length of his gun, a grotesque and uniquely masculine move, and Simone watches him, thinking of the power he holds.
The coach driver pulls into a lay-by where they idle for several moments before moving off again and joining a queue. Simone’s hands begin to sweat. The flip phone tumbles out of her grasp. What if they checkthat, see the instructions?
She is in the very centre of the coach, at a window seat, and suddenly she wants to disappear again. To pretend to be asleep, to get right under the seats and hide. To go into the toilet and refuse to come out.
To confess.
She picks the phone up and squeezes her eyes shut instead. Fuck the kidnapper. Fuck the ransom. Fuck her own stupid, tired body and mind that didn’t wake up when her child needed her; her maternal instinct unpractised due to the passage of time.
The drugs are somewhere directly underneath her, and she swears she can feel them burning upwards, a volcano popping ferociously, about to blow. A hot coal pulsing and glowing for everybody to see.
They pull to a complete stop and one of the older people sighs. ‘Takes forever going back,’ he says, American accent, irritated tone. He’s alone, and speaking to nobody in particular, and everybody ignores him. Simone wants to clutch at his clothes, ask him how often they’re searched, ask him to ship the drugs instead of her, please, oh please, but she doesn’t.
The driver stands up, the coach’s suspension creaking with the movement. A female Border Patrol officer gets on, exactly the same as before, but this time tasked with protecting America and not Mexico, and says, ‘Passports,’ authoritative and loud, uniform on, an official of the state, and, suddenly, it’s time.Just don’t kill Lucy, she is thinking, panicked.Take me, but give the drugs to the kidnapper, and get Lucy.
The officer is next to her, now; she’s tall and broad, staring down, making a hand-it-over kind of gesture, and Simone holds up her passport. She’s in a green uniform, gun in holster, but has on a cowboy hat, something Lucy would find absurd and wonderful and so very Texan, and there is still a little glimmer of her humour in the dead of this awful, awful nightmare.
Simone’s entire body tenses as the officer looks at her passport, and then at her, thinking of the questions she filled in on her ESTA. Where she was intending to stay, that she’d never been arrested before, never stayed longer than her visa anywhere, had never shipped drugs nor been convicted for drugs offences. Questions she and Lucy had WhatsApped about in the family group, laughed at, thought over the top. Lucy had created a poll, saying ‘Have you ever beheaded somebody? Yes, No, Maybe,’ and Damien, so earnest, had votedNo.
And does Simone imagine something passing across this officer’s features, now, virtually unseen? Does she haveradar for nervous people, for people making single day trips?
‘A Brit?’ she says conversationally.
‘Right, visiting from London.’
‘Seeing family and friends?’ she says, passing her passport back to her. Her name badge saysMICHAELA.
‘My daughter. She stayed in Texas. Mexico just – by myself.’
‘Nice. I have a daughter, just one,’ she replies, rubbing briefly at her eyes. She must be in her fifties, looks tired, no doubt working long hours for not much money, hair grey under the hat. ‘She’s twenty.’ She laughs under her breath. ‘Wants to be a –’ she clicks her fingers, trying to remember the word – ‘a space psychologist – isn’t that weird?’
‘That is so weird,’ Simone says, thinking Lucy would justlovethis. She’d ask all sorts of questions.
‘Yeah. It’s still all just psychology, so she tells me,’ she drawls.
‘Still. Impressive job.’
‘Well, apparently astronauts are prone to mental health issues from the isolation. So the training is all about that – solitude,’ she says. ‘Anyway, here’s me going on and on. Enjoy the rest of your trip.’
‘I will.’ Then, just as she’s leaving, Michaela turns back to her, and Simone thinks maybe she has had some sort of psychology training herself, because she says, ‘Are you, you know … you’re all right?’
‘Oh yes,’ Simone answers, her body vibrating with anxiety. The officer waits, seemingly, for more information, so Simone gives it, as close to honesty as she can get. ‘Just miss my daughter, you know? Anyway, I’m almost with her. I shouldn’t have gone on the day trip. It was tedious,’ she says, something Old Simone might easily have said.
Michaela throws her head back, laughs and catches her hat as it begins to slide off. ‘Ain’t that the truth.’
‘Right.’
‘Hard being apart from them,’ she adds sympathetically, and for just a beat, Simone wonders if she could tell her, this woman.Turn a blind eye; my daughter’s life is at risk.
But the moment passes, and Michaela then touches her hand to Simone’s shoulder, just like that. And Simone could weep with it. This interaction, her kindness, her understanding.
And Simone is a criminal, a fraud, but this woman has allowed her to be simply a mother missing her kid.
‘Thank you,’ Simone says, and Michaela removes her hand with the lightest, kindest brush, a mother’s touch.
She turns to leave again just as a distant sound registers itself. At first, Simone ignores it. It’s a common sound, one she hears all the time, and it takes a few repetitions for her tired, stressed brain to register it: it’s a dog barking.
A sniffer dog.
