‘No. No.’
Outside, the very early morning is still dark and porous. Simone knows they will be silhouetted from outside, a little shadow play for the world to see. She needs to blow out the flame, but she wants to wait for Lucy to wind down, relax, for her breathing to slow.
‘Anything else?’
‘The messenger’s voice I did hear. I was passed into his arms, and he found it easier to hold my weight, and I felt higher up, so I’d say the kidnapper is a smaller man than the man you … than the messenger. But still – large and strong enough to kidnap me in the first place.’ And this is it: information. It’s their most vital commodity, more important than their food, their water, their shelter in their tent.
‘What kind of car was it?’ Simone asks, figuring they will release the name of the dead man soon enough, and wondering if that will lead them to the kidnapper.
‘Hmm,’ Lucy says, sleepy. ‘Not sure.’ A pause. ‘Will you watch me to sleep?’ she asks, something she’s never once said. Lucy was an independent child, said, ‘Go away, Mummy,’ at her first school drop-off.
‘Of course,’ Simone answers. ‘Do you know, the police came, after you were taken. A traffic cop, by the street.’
‘Huh? Oh really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you wish you’d called out to him – got help?’
‘No,’ Simone says honestly. ‘Because that might’ve meant I wouldn’t have you.’
‘Mmm,’ Lucy says, and she is sliding into sleep. Simone leans over and blows out the oil lamp, plunging them into a darkness so thick it is more like blindness.
She holds her breath, waiting for their tent to be ripped open at any moment by an anonymous, voiceless kidnapper. Or, worse, unzipped slowly and gleefully by somebody who gets off on taking women.
All around is silence. Before sleep comes for Simone, she entwines her hand around Lucy’s, which is already slack with slumber, powdery with desert dust. She can’t not be touching her. She would wake if somebody tried to take her, this way, mother and daughter, joined still.
CHAPTER 38
Simone wakes to bright daylight, the sun high, the tent neon blue with it, and she enjoys one, two, three delicious beats before she remembers. The first clue is Lucy’s hand in hers. She’s OK: Simone’s unconscious mind was checking on her before her conscious mind caught up. And the next thing she thinks of isn’t the ransom, the drugs; it’s that she, Simone, is a killer. It comes back to her in broken fragments.
She stares down at her own hands. The hands of a murderer. In all of it, she has thought of this least.
A man who was previously healthy is now dead. A man who was once a baby in the crook of somebody’s elbow, a toddler bending over to inspect insects, a schoolkid, a seven-year-old, telling stories to his mother. She can hardly picture the moment it happened. Simone always thought time slowed down in disasters, but for her it sped up, on warp, holding the gun, the man stumbling. The blood. The ricochet echoing around the desert.
Simone rolls on to her stomach. She wants to offload to Damien. She wants an outdoor date night with him. She wants to walk and talk. She wants to chop vegetables while he goes through bookings. She wants to gossip about how expensive their guests’ handbags are while he tries everything she’s cooking, burns his fingers and says he doesn’t care.
Lucy’s eyelashes fan semicircles across her cheeks, herbreathing steady. Simone hopes it’s a good sign that her daughter has been able to sleep this first night, even though the ground is hard, the wind high.
She gets to her feet and unzips the tent. It sounds like a klaxon in the quiet, though Lucy doesn’t stir.
She escapes clumsily through the flap at the bottom. She spins in a slow circle. There’s no one around. They could be on Mars, the moon. There could’ve been an apocalypse. No contact, no newspapers. She thinks of the restaurant back home, the buzz of it. In her mind, she traces herself through that back corridor, to her step where she waits for the fresh produce.
She’s taking delivery of the fish, first thing. She’s the only one there. It comes in from Margate, scentless, fresh and cool. The polystyrene boxes. The slippery fat bodies. She is here, she is happy. She is about to start cooking. She’s making potatoes flavoured with lime. She’s got the balance of salty and sweet and sour just right. They’re steaming hot, a sprinkle of lime rind on the top. And, soon, all this input, the attention to detail, it’s going to pay off, and they’re going to get that Michelin star.
There’s a flat rock near the tent, and she sits on it and watches the horizon lines.
She can’t believe they haven’t been found. She can’t believe that, two months ago, her only looming problem was empty-nest syndrome, which inverted itself when Lucy said she didn’t want to leave. It was uncharacteristic, and bothering Simone on multiple, complicated levels, the way things often do in parenting.
‘I’m surprised you don’t want to, you know,’ Simone had said. They had been sitting in the kitchen at Dishes, in the quiet time after the lunch service and before the evening.Simone was spatchcocking chickens, watching Lucy take a bite out of an offensive shop-bought sandwich.
‘What?’
‘Spread your wings,’ Simone had said delicately. ‘Live out.’
‘I’ve been spatchcocked.’
‘Be serious.’
