To her surprise, Lucy stands silently against a blank white wall in Moody’s house, her mouth a low, flat line, her expression heartbroken but silent. Damien realizes her intent, and gets the phone to use as a camera. Just out of shot is a photograph of the sky that perhaps Moody has taken, featuring the Texas clouds that look like meringues.
Dark clothes, Lucy’s hair glowing almost white against tanned skin. Damien takes the photos, and then Simone flicks through them. She logs on to the email account Damien got from the dark web, ready to send them, standing there by her husband and daughter in the hallway.
It’s funny that, sometimes, the risk has been taken but the results take time to materialize. Simone carefully rereads the instructions.Upload documentsas a draftto an email account. They’re not to send it. The person providing identities will then log on, download the attachments to the draft, without leaving evidence of a sent or received item on any server.
Payment is cash on collection. The identities will be ready within twelve hours, available to pick up at the port. The less Simone thinks about where they have come from, the better. Are their photos to be attached to the dead, the murdered, or just the fabricated?
As she uploads their photographs in miniature, that feeling: settles over her again, the futuristic, unreal feeling: the photos look like mugshots.
CHAPTER 62
The identities will be ready to pick up at the port at Galveston the next afternoon. They’re given a locker number on a draft email, a time and a code. Attached to the email is a photograph of their documents. Their images, new names. They’re to pay for them only on pickup. They’re in too deep to even contemplate the possibility that it’s a scam.
With no time to lose, they reserve tickets on a boat to the Bahamas. Only a cruise ship will take them direct, but it’ll have to do. They leave straight away. They have no idea if the identities will work, but they can’t stay here. Terlingua is more dangerous than anywhere.
Damien is asleep in the back of an empty coach at three thirty in the morning and Simone and Lucy sit bunched up next to him, hoping the driver doesn’t watch the news, isn’t good with faces … They have gone for disguises; Lucy wearing a woolly hat they found in Moody’s wardrobe, justified by the night-time desert chill, Simone wearing a pair of Damien’s reading glasses that magnify everything but make her face look slightly different. It’s the best they can do.
Simone is surprised to note that this does feel, in some ways, like a holiday, like her body remembers the holiday-specific things: the rumble of an early coach stopping briefly in Terlingua centre, suitcases dragged on ground. Simone wonders if they will ever holiday again, but finds she can’tengage the thoughts. They’re like repelling magnets, pushing this way and that, persuading her to look anywhere but directly at the future.
They have run out of viable options; instead they are chasing down a dream that seems to get further and further away, a desert mirage.
This thought bleeds seamlessly into another. Simone is thinking of Lucy in the kitchen. The moody blue light. The ominous, melancholic night they discovered the British man wasn’t the kidnapper. Lucy’s gaze.
Parents have to let their children go.
It is still dark outside. Cicadas, crickets, biting wind. Inside the coach it’s warm. Lucy leans her head on Simone’s shoulder, mock tired, but then leaves it there. Her face is tilted up to her mother’s in the blackness, the expression on it contemplative.
‘You OK?’
‘You know, I think I am,’ Lucy says in a slight whisper, even though the driver can’t hear. He’s looking ahead, his back straight. He’s uninterested at most, ignorant at worst. Next to them, Damien’s breathing deepens. The coach has nobody else on it yet.
They hit a small town, they’re not sure which one, but it has street lights that illuminate Lucy’s face. They’re many hours from the port still, and Simone suddenly wishes with a weird ferocity that she was like Damien. Simple. Optimistic. Able to be flexible about life changes and to sleep on a bus taking them to an illegal border crossing. She thinks of her coach trip spent shaking in the back, and grimaces.
‘I’m really OK,’ Lucy says.
And, right at this moment, Simone realizes something deep and true about her daughter: she’s really good at acting, perhaps even to herself, which is otherwise known as denial.
‘Are you?’ she probes.
‘It’s the best of a bad situation, isn’t it?’ Lucy answers. ‘Hopefully the documents will be sound. Hopefully we will get them and get the boat.’
Simone sighs. It’s such a long shot. These elusive identities. The protracted journey for possibly nothing. If the identities aren’t sound, they have absolutely nowhere to go.
But they can’t stay in Terlingua, either.
‘Can I ask you something? I’ve been thinking – since the meringue … what did you mean about letting you go?’ Simone asks, speaking aloud the question that has been on her mind rather than worry about the identities, their endless failed plans.
Lucy looks at Simone, and something wordless seems to pass between them. ‘What?’ Simone says, softly, in a whisper.
‘Nothing,’ Lucy says. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’
‘Did you mean to RADA – our talk about you moving out?’
‘Sure,’ Lucy says. But her eyes say differently.
CHAPTER 63
Galveston Port looms into view. It took so long, almost all their cash now gone, the rest to be spent on the identities and the cruise ship tickets they reserved, but it’s worth it because it kept the number of people who saw them low. They didn’t need to fly, or go through a train station terminal. And here they are.
