‘I’d say it’s never the child’s fault,’ she said in a small voice, and that had been all it had taken. Damien had joined her on the rope swing and they’d twirled and glided there in the dappled sunlight, Simone crying on and off, Damien saying nothing with his words and everything with his arms around her.
‘We’ll go on another trip,’ Simone repeats now. ‘None of this is your fault, Luce.’
‘And Mum – it isn’t yours,’ Lucy says simply, and Simone leaves it there.
‘I need to …’ Simone says, and she eases herself out of the car, gesturing again to her phone. ‘Dad.’
Lucy nods, her eyes wet and scared.
Damien doesn’t answer what Simone can’t bear to think might be the last contact between them for a while, and Simone isn’t surprised; he can’t.
Only, this time, she leaves a voicemail. ‘I …’ she says, wondering if this will incriminate him, or her, or everyone, but not able to leave without some words. She can’t say she will try to contact him – his phone will be being watched. She can’t think about how impossible it all is.
But they will go home again. Of course they will. They’rejust – figuring it out, for now. Buying time on credit, on overdrafts, on high-interest loans. So she says the only thing she feels she can: ‘I … God, Damien. I love you. I can’t wait for us all to be together again. I wish none of this had ever happened.’
There’s nothing else left to say. She can’t give a clue to her whereabouts, and neither can she implicate him. All she can do is speak from the heart. ‘I’m wishing we could be with you,’ she says. ‘Always.’
This is asee you later. That’s all.
It has to be.
She presses End Call even though it feels unsatisfying, incomplete. But she needed Damien to know she loves him.
She stares up again at the American sky and she thinks about her plan, as flimsy as those stars made of gas and heat.
The first step is to buy a phone that isn’t connected to them, so that they can keep an eye on the news.
The second step is the scrapyard. They’ve got to get a different car.
CHAPTER 33
Simone instructs Lucy to stay by the car while she goes into the shop. They’re less conspicuous apart, though Lucy being in the car alone is making Simone uncomfortable as she rushes around the aisles. She hesitates every few seconds, peering out.
American petrol stations are different from those in the UK. The far wall is fake brick, lined with vending machines. The rest of the shop is huge but sort of quaint, linoleum floor made to look like distressed wood. It sells almost everything you can think of in small quantities at high prices. Less of the UK focus on the practical, and more on pleasure. Simone could linger for hours here at theSUGARED NUTS/DIPPIN’ DOTSaisle, but doesn’t. Still, she catches glimpses of things as she makes her way around the shop: red Texas T-shirts, peanut butter, jalapeño popcorn, cowboy hats, candyfloss in buckets.
At the end of a small aisle is a display of Motorola phones, and she buys one in cash, forty dollars, looking away from the cashier. She makes sure it has internet, GPS, is a usable smartphone, but not so smart it will reveal their location to apps that don’t ask permission.
Back out to the car. ‘Leave the phones here but switched on,’ Simone says in a low voice through the window. Another bin, another roadside, but this time, they don’t destroy them. Simone wants them to be traced, for people to think they are hiding here, at least for a little while.
They drop down with two distinct thuds. To the authorities, Simone and Lucy’s movements will terminate here, and, together with the CCTV she’s just been captured on in the shop, the police will search here for them, especially as Simone avoided the hire car being caught on CCTV in the petrol station. It doesn’t buy them anything except time, but that’s enough for now.
Simone approaches the scrapyard. It’s unmanned, cars abandoned on a rocky forecourt, no CCTV. She only hopes she can persuade somebody to sell her a car. She walks a loop around them, desperately trying a handle or two, wondering how she ended up here. If someone looks and acts like a criminal, are they?
Back into the shop. ‘Isn’t the car place open?’ she asks.
‘No,’ the assistant says, his tone disparaging. A pointed glance at a clock above him.
Simone stares at it for just a few seconds, watches the hands slow-moving around its face.
‘When will it open?’
‘Nine, like most things,’ he replies.
They can’t spare the time.
‘You can’t sell me one of those cars?’ she asks desperately. Simone is good at getting things, at persuading people, but it’s a lost cause today; she knows it is. He will remember her. He will tell the police what car he sold them.
‘No, guy’s due in at nine,’ he repeats. ‘He’s got the keys.’
