I’m on my way back to Gloucestershire, I texted Eddie,quick as a wink.Supporting my friend Tommy; he’s launching a big sports project at our old school. If you wanted to meet up, I could stay at my parents’. Would be good to talk. Sarah x
No pride, no shame. I’d somehow moved beyond that. I tapped the screen of my phone every few seconds, waiting for a delivery report.
Delivered, it announced perkily.
I watched the screen, checking for a text bubble. A text bubble would mean he was writing back.
No text bubble.
I looked again. No text bubble.
I looked again. Still no text bubble. I slid my phone into my handbag, out of sight. This was what girls did when they were still in the tender agonies of adolescence, I thought. Girls, still learning to love themselves, waiting in mild hysteria to hear from a boy they’d kissed in a sweaty corner last Friday. This was not the behaviour of a woman of thirty-seven. A woman who’d travelled the world, survived tragedy, run a charity.
The rain was clearing. Through the crack of open window I could smell the tang of wet tarmac and damp, smoky earth.I am in agony.I stared vacantly at a field of round hay bales, squeezed tightly into shining black plastic like pudgy legs into tights. I would tip over the edge soon. I would tip over the edge and go into free fall if I didn’t find out what had happened.
I checked my phone. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d taken out my SIM card and rebooted. Time to try again.
Half an hour later we were on the dual carriageway coming into Cirencester and Rudi was asking his mother why the clouds were all moving in different directions.
We were a matter of mere miles from where I’d met him. I closed my eyes, trying to remember my walk that hot morning. Those uncomplicated few hours Before Eddie. The sour-milk sweetness of elderflower blossom. Yes, and scorched grass. The drift of butterflies, stunned by the heat. There had been a barley field, a feathered, husk-green carpet panting and bulging with hot air. The occasional explosion of a startled rabbit. And the strange sense of expectation that had hovered over the village that day, the boiling stillness, the littered secrets.
Unbidden, my memory fast-forwarded a few more minutes to the moment I actually met Eddie – a straightforward, friendly man with warm eyes and an open face, holding court with an escaped sheep – and misery and confusion tangled like weeds over everything else.
‘You can tell me I’m in denial,’ I said to the silent car. ‘But it wasn’t a fling. It was . . . it was everything. We both knew. That’s why I’m sure something’s happened to him.’
The idea made my breath stick to the inside of my throat.
‘Say something,’ Jo said to Tommy. ‘Say something to her.’
‘I work in sports consultancy,’ he muttered. Embarrassment bloomed on his neck. ‘I do bodies, not heads.’
‘Who does heads?’ Rudi asked. He was still keeping close tabs on our conversation.
‘Therapists do heads,’ Jo said wearily. ‘Therapists and me.’
Ferapists.She pronounced itferapists. Jo was born and bred in Bow, was a proper, salt-of-the-earth cockney. And I loved her; I loved her bluntness and mercurial temper, I loved her fearlessness (lack of boundaries, others might say), and most of all I loved the tremendous fury with which she adored her son. I loved everything about Jo, but I would still have preferred not to be in a car with her today.
Rudi asked me if we were nearly there yet. I told him yes. ‘Is that your school?’ he asked, pointing at an industrial estate.
‘No, although there are some architectural similarities.’
‘Isthatyour school?’
‘No. That’s Waitrose.’
‘How long till we get there?’
‘Not long.’
‘How many minutes?’
‘About twenty?’
Rudi slumped back into his seat in self-conscious despair. ‘That’sages,’ he muttered. ‘Mum, I need some new games. Can I have some new games?’
Jo said he could not, and Rudi set about buying some anyway. I watched in awe as he matter-of-factly typed in Jo’s Apple ID and password.
‘Er, excuse me,’ I whispered. He looked up at me, his little blond Afro an unlikely halo, his almond-shaped eyes cartwheeling with mischief. He mimed a zip being shut across his mouth and then pointed a warning finger at me. And because I loved this child far more than I wanted to, I did what I was told.
