Simone blinks, then nods, thinking. But it isn’t a helicopter, not in the silence.
‘It’s a drone,’ Lucy says softly.
So maybe they haven’t been found, not yet. A computer is methodically searching the desert, will feed its information back to the police, so they will be found soon.
When it comes to it, there is no decision. None at all. Lucy cannot go to prison. So, unless they are being arrested, on they go. They will prolong this half-life of living hand to mouth, eating salted potatoes, brushing their hair with forks, drinking from streams, because it is better than the alternative.They will try to get to Terlingua, find somebody to help them. Either they are about to solve it, or they will get found.
They need to collapse and move the tent. Its blue form is too obvious.
Simone inches out first, peeling the zip downwards as slowly and as quietly as she can. Her unbrushed hair has dried stiffly into a ponytail. It feels wiry. Sea-salt hair. Her skin is coarse, too, from too much sun. They’ve run out of the suncream.
Outside, it’s easy to see the drone blinking up ahead. An indistinct shape, an alien spaceship, one single beam coming down as though from heaven. As she peers out, it blinds her, winking once, twice, and Simone thinks they might be too late. Lucy gets out and unpins the tent and begins to drag it to a large boulder, her movements hurried but deft.
‘We need to get out of the footage,’ Lucy says.
‘We need to get the tent down.’
They stand flat against a rock, not moving, just waiting for the drone to pass. It will surely reveal their location to the police. It’s just a matter of how much time they have.
The drone hasn’t slowed at all, is still making its distant kind of whirring, and Simone tells herself it isn’t the police. It’s a wildlife tracker or something else she doesn’t understand.
It moves on after ten minutes, zigzagging to a new part of the desert. It lights up the ground in white spots. Simone watches it pass, an AI tool sent to report on them.
They leave it a while, until it’s totally out of sight, and inch away from the tent, silently beginning to move again, limbs and muscles too tired, but they have to go, regardless. Back in the night air, they’re barely visible to one another, clothes too dark to see, their limbs fuzzy white bones as they walk, and Simone finds for just a second – just one – she misses the light of the drone. Of action, of authority. Of an ending.
Simone hasn’t yet told Lucy about Damien’s messages. She doesn’t want to worry her daughter, nor get her hopes up. She is thinking this as Lucy speaks.
‘If it was them, they will know we are going to Terlingua.’
‘I know,’ Simone says. ‘But there’s nowhere else, right?’
‘No. We could go two hundred miles east, hit somewhere else, but they’ll find us before we get there.’
‘OK,’ Simone says softly, sadly. And she doesn’t add that they don’t have that much time. It isn’t just the police. Their bags are so much lighter. They got more water from the stream but no more food.
They will die out here, the land unforgiving. They can’t forage. They can’t shelter. And there isn’t time.
‘Terlingua is big enough to disappear in?’ Simone checks again. Lucy has gone so brown in the sun, her hair much lighter. Rather than obscuring her, it makes her look even more like herself, somehow. They’re so conspicuous. Simone can’t imagine arriving in Terlingua together. A blonde British mother and daughter on the run.
‘Definitely.’
They walk and walk into the bleaching dawn, and an hour in, as if on cue, the flip phone Simone left on this time lights up with signal once more. A small E in the top right-hand corner of the screen. The lowest form of signal, but a blink of civilization nevertheless.
Simone immediately experiences the unedifying mix of curiosity, horror and panic as she opens it. For the news stories. That her conversation with Damien might have been rumbled. That she might read of his arrest, hers imminent.
The pages populate painfully slowly. Her own name brings up a depressing army of results.1 of 100,000, says Google, and she flicks to the news tab – another two minutes for it to load – and then to the first story.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER STILL WANTED, it says. The press has found a better photo of them now than the stills from the dashcam footage. It loads slowly, a stripe at a time like an old-fashioned printer. By the time the top half has filled, Simone knows which photo it is. She took it. A selfie outside Dishes, their cheeks close together in the way that Simone likes but is rarely permitted, the white front of the restaurant backlit behind them.
What the newspapers don’t know, of course, is the story behind it. This was the day, Simone thinks, that theMichelin Guideinspector visited. The process is secretive, even to her. You can’t apply. There is no online form to fill in. They simply have to get wind of you, that you are cooking great innovative food, that your service is at least consistent, if not impeccable, and then you wait for them to come. Simone, an untrained chef who’d opened a restaurant on a whim and then fallen in love with food, thought it would never happen.
It would change everything. The restaurant business is not a model anybody would invent and seek to replicate if they were to start from scratch. The cost of fresh ingredients rocketing, the rent, the business rates, the wages. Dishes is regularly written about in the press – theMailrecently featured Simone in her home, headlineTHE ACCIDENTAL CHEF, which Lucy said sounded like a Netflix series, ‘And not a good one’ – but, even so, the bank account is woeful. So woeful the police suspect a drugs run as the ludicrous solution. The star would change everything. The selfie commemorated that.
‘Do you think you’ll get it?’ Lucy had said. Simone remembers perfectly this February night. It had been unseasonably warm, the first T-shirt day of the year. Lucy had called by after school, coming in the pink door, wandering into the kitchen wearing her trademark Crocs and socks, rucksack slung overone shoulder. Her hair had been messy, in a ponytail that flopped right over her head.
‘No,’ Simone had said, a natural impulse, self-protection, all that old stuff. She couldn’t look at it. She wanted it so badly.
Lucy had gazed around the kitchen. It was perfunctory but tired, money so tight that Simone sometimes scrimped on things that weren’t food. Cheap dishwasher tablets, using cloths until they fell into shreds like tagliatelle. ‘I think you’ll get it,’ Lucy said with the kind of conviction that comes from privilege, but in a good way, a nice way. It healed something within Simone to raise somebody who might, by others, be considered entitled. Better to be spoilt than neglected.
