It opens with a dim corner of a room. A bulb hanging in the centre, which flares sunspots into the low-quality camera lens. A figure on the floor in the corner. Waves of unreality keep breaking over Simone. She’s rocking as she stands there, hanging on now to the door frame like she’s surviving an earthquake. This can’t be, this can’t be, this can’t be. Her brain is trying to make sense of something that isn’t. That doesn’t – they will kill her –
On the video, Lucy looks up. Blurry, grainy, but unmistakably her. Her wrists appear to be bound behind her back. Legs free, face and head free.
‘I’m Lucy Seaborn,’ her daughter says. And it’s her face and her full and rounded voice that projects so effortlessly. Her exact cadence, accent, nose, eyes, everything. She has her shoulders back against a plain wall, a result of her bound wrists. Legs tucked up in front of her. She’s wearing what she was yesterday: shorts and a white T-shirt. Simone touches the screen, her daughter’s blonde hair – the hair, the hair – bony shoulders … ‘I’m safe and have food and water,’ she says, though her voice catches on the last two words. ‘Please do what they say. I don’t know what they will do to me if you don’t.’ The rush of white-noise panic continues in Simone’s ears, her brain’s futile suggestions and explanations ended and grim acceptance kicking in.
Simone watches it again, hoping to spot some clue. And she does, but it doesn’t appear to mean anything: at the veryedge of the frame, on the floor, are the distinctive spokes of a desk chair. She pauses, plays again. There’s wallpaper. She can’t zoom in, but she can see there are flowers on it. This isn’t some cave somewhere: it’s an ordinary room in somebody’s house. Simone isn’t sure whether or not this makes it worse.
As incongruity settles over her, Simone finds herself thinking something that maybe every parent has, or maybe it’s just her. She is ashamed to admit it. That she doesn’t want Lucy to move out, ever – to move on. And why? Because ever since she gave birth to Lucy, took her temperature when ill, stopped her running into the street, hovered with her hands underneath her while on climbing frames, she was doing so because she feared that she might lose her. And look: she was right.
Simone tries to think.
She watches the video a torturous number of times, then reads the message again. It says not to call the police. It says they will kill her. She tries, unsuccessfully again, to unlock Lucy’s phone. She needs to access her contacts, the people she’s been with all summer whose numbers she doesn’t have, but she can’t. Two more failed passcode attempts, and with a scream of frustration, she’s locked out for half an hour.
She closes the front and back doors, gets out her own phone, paces to the bathroom, irrationally hiding, closes that door too, and presses the numbers 911. Slow beeps. But she doesn’t press Call. How could she? Her thumb shakes as it hovers over the green button. She can’t do it. She can’t.
Simone rereads the message again, but it doesn’t say she can’t tell anybody else, only not to tell the police. So instead, she dials one of the only people in the world she truly trusts: Damien.
The call connects on the fourth ring.
‘Howdy, partner, how’s Texas?!’ he says. In the background, the specific sounds of the restaurant during lunchtimeservice. The other chefs talking in low voices, chopping, doors opening and closing. Somewhere one of them, Timeo she thinks, swears.
‘Damien,’ Simone says, wishing now that she’d collected herself. She had no choice about how and when this information was given to her, but she could have protected him.
‘What?’ he says, and, whereas Simone would be immediately suspicious, Damien’s voice is high and light; he is dimly aware bad things may happen, but only to other people.
‘Lucy’s been taken,’ she says.
‘What? Taken where?’
Simone inhales slowly. The bathroom smells of cool air and cheap shower gel. ‘We got to the cabin last night, went to sleep, and this morning when I woke up she’d gone. There’s a new phone in her bed with an automated – I think? – call and then message saying someone’s got her, with a video of her bound, sitting down. She tells me she doesn’t know what they will do if I don’t comply. They say she is safe “for now”.’ She gulps. ‘They say if I call the police, they will kill her. They say, “Be prepared to do a deal.” A deal? They mean a fucking ransom. I don’t – I don’t know – I don’t know if it’s real, but she isn’t here … I don’t know what to do. But the authorities – they could tell me if the video is faked.’ Despite her pause, it still comes out garbled.
Damien is silent, and Simone’s mind uses this time to betray her by connecting two awful ugly truths.
Something woke her at four o’clock in the morning, which she ignored.
That something was her daughter being taken.
And Simone simply went back to sleep, tired and selfish. She got her six hours’ sleep while Lucy suffered.
She can barely hear Damien’s response when it comes. ‘What?’ he is saying. ‘What do you mean,taken? A ransom?’
She explains again, this time more slowly, staring at the glass shower bricks. She tells him about the hair and is made more anxious by his gasp.
‘Where is she?’ he asks, nonsensically.
‘I don’t know. They’re … They told me to meet them at a lay-by tonight. By a church. I don’t know,’ she says again, and, somehow, somewhere deep in her mind, she had thought that telling Damien this, and unburdening herself, might help. But the problem isn’t halved in the sharing. It is actually doubled. Two hearts are now broken. Two minds are panicking.
‘Take a photo of the text and send it to me. Forward me the video. Did you call the number back?’
‘It’s anonymous. It all is.’
‘Send over what you have.’
‘No – I can’t … I don’t want anything written down,’ she tells him, and this is the first hint, to Simone, that she is thinking about doing precisely what these people tell her to.
‘But … you’re in Texas,’ Damien says, still processing the facts. ‘You’re not in – I don’t know! Colombia! Took her how? Where were you?’ he says, and within this Simone uncovers an accusation like turning over a stone and finding cockroaches. Damien’s never been like this. Never raises his voice. His careful, slow tidying up of her restaurant’s mess never thrown in her face. She thinks about a recent outdoor date night, walking through Hyde Park at sunset, and wonders if the events here, now, will fracture them forever.
‘I don’t know,’ she tells him. ‘I was asleep. But … I woke,’ she says. ‘I woke and – I don’t know what woke me and I went back to sleep.’ She says it because she needs to. She says it because the guilt is heavy on her shoulders. She says it because it is Damien, and she has learned to tell him, and only him, the truth. Nobody else gets all of Simone.
