Simone walks into Lucy’s room. It’s empty. Her suitcase lies open and filleted, exactly as Simone expected. She turns and heads back into the hallway and through to the kitchen. A pan, two plates, two knives, two forks, all from the omelettes, and one mug from Lucy’s bedtime tea. Cracked eggs and a teabag in the bin. But nothing else. No signs of life.
She checks the bathroom, the back garden, but she knows, somehow, that Lucy isn’t in the lodge. The specific way the air feels in an empty house: the quiet, some sort of dormantfeeling, the echo of one’s thoughts? She doesn’t know. Only that she is alone, and wasn’t expecting to be.
‘Lucy?’ she calls aloud out back. The heat of the day shimmers outside in zigzags above the other cabins. The small shared pool is flat and blue, undisturbed save for a few flies littering its surface. Nothing. Crickets, literally, fruit trees, and the air as warm as an exhalation, clammy against her skin.
She turns around, wondering if she’s missed something, some detail, some other room, some piece of information, maybe Lucy had plans this morning that she’s forgotten …
She touches the kettle, absent-mindedly feeling for warmth: nothing. Lucy always has tea first thing. The shower is unused, cubicle dry, no steam, towels still folded on three shelves.
It’s as if she was never here.
Maybe she’s headed out for breakfast things? Simone peers through the front window, the desert a still and unforgiving backdrop. But Lucy would never head out for breakfast things. Simone would, Lucy wouldn’t. If left to her own devices, Lucy would eat a dry piece of bread for breakfast, just to get it done. In this situation she would wait for Simone to wake up and make something nice.
‘Lucy?’ she calls again. Nothing.
In the hallway, the concertina door catches her eye. It is open more than she remembers. An odd amount. Not enough to walk comfortably through. But definitely not how they left it last night, is it? She can’t quite remember. Lucy did it.Look, well, obviously she’s out, so she’s gone out of that door, Simone tells herself, in a particularly stern voice she invented in childhood in order to cope with the way her parents were.
She wrenches the door open fully. It squeaks along the wooden floor. She walks outside, on to the porch, descendsthe steps, and looks around. Nothing. No sign she’s left, but no sign she hasn’t, either. Simone’s hire car, nothing else. Terracotta tiles hot underneath her feet, even at this hour, none of England’s dew. Craggy plants, patchy grass. She ventures further, stands barefoot on the dusty road, no markings, and stares. It’s miles long, straight and totally empty. The sandy gravel is tinged red. It could be the sunrise; it could be just the way it is, Mars-like and eerie. Where would Lucy even be? You can’t walk anywhere around here.
Her thoughts begin to shift from pragmatic to panicked. She gets her phone and dials. An international calling code that Simone has become used to this summer but still dislikes. It’s different. Everything here is different.
Voicemail.
She texts. Two ticks. She pauses, watching, but nothing. It doesn’t get read.
That is when the confusion and worry morph into something else, a desert flower that explodes suddenly and unnaturally into bloom.
Is her daughter missing? Or is she merelyout, will return in ten minutes with a bag of American cinnamon rolls? Simone can almost feel the earth moving, turning on a dime. She calls Lucy again but, this time, she hears something. She pulls her own phone away from her ear, cocks her head, walks into Lucy’s room.
Where is it coming from? A muffled and rhythmic vibration, a phone on a soft surface. She palms the sheet and discovers two things: Lucy’s mobile, ringing quietly at the foot of the bed, and that the sheets are cold.
Simone’s back begins to prickle with fear. And then, before she can fully digest it, she sees something else: Lucy’s shoes. The Crocs she was in last night. Simone looks at them, blinking. She doesn’t understand. No. Maybe she … Doesshe … She curses not knowing her daughter’s entire wardrobe right now. She is her mother. She ought to know how many pairs of shoes she has. She ought to still be doing her laundry. They’ve separated too early. This is the feeling Simone has all the time, the heartbreak that sits at the centre of parenthood: if Lucy’s independence is so natural, then how come it feels so wrong?
Why would she not take her phone? Even if she was just going … No. There’s nowhere Lucy doesn’t take her phone. She was balking about it being locked away from her, after all.
Lucy’s mobile prompts her for a passcode she doesn’t know. Six digits. She tries her date of birth – 310308 – but it fails.Two attempts remaining.
Simone spins around. Stupid questions fill her mind. How long does it take a bedsheet to return to a cool temperature after being slept in? How many pairs of shoes does somebody bring camping – surely more than one? And more than just Crocs?
Maybe she left something at Bea’s. But that’s miles away, not walking distance. Would she have called another cab? Left her phone here?
Simone stands there, her hands on her hips in her daughter’s room, and she lets herself feel it. Creeping monstrous fingers reaching towards her. Dark storm-cloud maternal instinct telling her: a hurricane is coming. Watch out.
Simone would say that nothing like this has ever happened to her before, but is that quite right?No, it isn’t, she thinks, doing a thorough walk around the pool, looking – absurdly – under sunloungers, and wondering at what point she calls someone. Damien. The police.
No. This feels familiar. It feels this way, Simone realizes, peering into a little shed to the left of the pool, because younever forget your near misses. That time Lucy ran off in Sainsbury’s when she was two and a half and Simone couldn’t find her for over three minutes. When Damien slammed on the brakes on the motorway, and Simone watched the car behind them fail to realize, and then do so just in time. The near misses are almost-lived experiences, the beginnings of tragedies that just do not quite, by luck, take off, like a single spark that sometimes causes a wildfire and sometimes doesn’t. These are what Simone remembers. This is what she hopes this will be. A near miss. An ember that might catch but doesn’t, no rhyme or reason to it, a grim reaper simply passing them by, unacknowledged.
It’s been half an hour. If by ten past eight nothing has happened, she will ring Damien. She puts a hand to the back of her head. It reminds her of him, is something he does to her sometimes during stressful times. He cups the back of her head soberly, absent-mindedly, with his huge hand, like a priest.
She heads outside again, where the sun heats her skin with a fierce pressure, like somebody has their hands all over her body. Next door, she climbs the porch steps and knocks, but there’s nothing. No answer, either, from the cabin opposite that. They are all empty; faceless houses around a deserted pool. A red life ring sits next to that and Simone stares at it, completely alone in the wilderness, thinking the worst.
Back in, through the hallway, and what she sees stops her dead.
CHAPTER 2
Hair. It’s hair, a real, proper knot of hair, on that broken front door. Simone reaches to touch it; she would know it anywhere. The precise thickness, colour, texture. It’s her daughter’s hair. So much of it, it would have caused such pain to come out.
She pulls gently and the clump comes away. She studies it, a soft curl sitting in her palm, and thinks that this is … that an injury has caused this.
