The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

14

January 2017

College restarts and Tallulah is glad.

Christmas Day was nice, Noah’s first.

Her dad, whose name is Jim, came down on Boxing Day, only the second time he’d seen Noah since he was born. He stayed in a room above the Swan & Ducks for two nights, and even paid for them all to have dinner there on the twenty-seventh. He was hugely taken with Noah and sat him on his knee and stared at him in wonder and called him the bonniest baby he’d ever seen. Tallulah’s father was normally very self-centred and distant, but becoming a grandfather seemed to have removed a layer of protection from around his heart.

But the Christmas magic soon dissipated and the novelty of seeing Noah in his Christmas elf outfit wore off, and on New Year’s Eve she was to stay home alone while her mum went to the pub with a group of friends and Ryan went to a party. It was one of the first moments that Tallulah felt stifled by the responsibilities and limitations of motherhood.

So when Zach offered to come and sit in with her that night, as much as she didn’t want him to get the wrong idea and think that they were on again, she also didn’t want to spend the night alone with a seven-month-old baby. So she said yes.

He arrived at 9 p.m., fresh from a friend’s house, smelling slightly of beer and cigarettes, his hood up against a cold wind, his hands stuffed inside his pockets with an off-licence carrier bag looped over his wrist.

She held the door ajar so he could come in and he leaned towards her for a quick peck on her cheek. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said.

‘Not quite,’ she said.

‘Is Noah in bed?’ He glanced up the stairs.

Tallulah nodded. ‘Been down for a while.’

‘Sorry I’m a bit late. They didn’t have what I wanted at the Co-op so I had to go into the pub for it. Had to queue for ages. Packed in there.’

He opened up the bag and let her peer inside.

Champagne, still cold from the fridge.

She smiled; she couldn’t help it. She loved champagne.

‘Saw your mum,’ he said, following her into the kitchen.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Looked like she was having fun.’

‘Good,’ she said, sliding the champagne into the fridge and pulling out two beers.

‘Got crisps as well.’ He pulled out two bags of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa. ‘And these, ’cos I know they’re your favourites.’ He presented her with a bag of Cadbury’s mini fingers.

She smiled again. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

They settled in front of the TV with their beers and the crisps. It was the first time she’d been alone with Zach in weeks, in months. Usually he came over during the day to spend time with Noah when he was awake. She’d thought it might feel a little awkward, but actually it didn’t. She and Zach had known each other since they were fourteen years old when he started at Tallulah’s school after moving from a boys’ school in the next village where he’d been bullied. She’d befriended him because he looked nice and she’d felt sorry for him and then they’d started dating and that was that. They were one of those teen couples that were part of the furniture, an unsurprising couple, not one to create chatter or intrigue.

So maybe it wasn’t so strange that Tallulah should have felt so comfortable in his company that night. They’d been friends, they’d been lovers, they’d been ex-lovers and now they were parents. There was no reason why they shouldn’t be able to be friends again.

They didn’t talk much that night, they let the telly entertain them, they looked at their phones and showed each other things that were amusing. At one point Zach snatched the phone from Tallulah’s hand and said, ‘Here, I want to see your camera roll, let me see.’

‘Get off!’ she’d laughed. ‘Why!’

‘Just want to see photos of Noah,’ he said and she let him scroll through her phone and it was nearly 100 per cent photos of Noah. But then the roll got as far back as the Christmas party at college and Zach slowed down and started looking at the pictures in more details.

‘You look nice,’ he said, zooming into her face in a selfie she and Chloe had taken just before they went home. ‘You’re wearing make-up.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Just eyeliner. Mum did it for me.’

‘Suits you,’ he said, turning and giving her a strange look. ‘Not like you to get all dolled up. And who’s that?’ he asked.

It’s a selfie, taken on the dance floor at the Christmas disco when she and Scarlett had been dancing to Mariah Carey. Scarlett must have taken it. The camera was held up high, both of them beaming with all their teeth on show, pieces of glitter just starting to fall from the netting overhead, catching the light.

‘That’s Scarlett, a girl at college.’

‘You look really happy,’ he said, zooming in on their smiles. ‘I kind of thought you’d forgotten how to smile like that.’

She made a dry sound of laughter. There was something accusatory in the tone of his voice, as if she’d somehow let him down by being happy.

‘Yeah, well,’ she said, ‘they were playing Mariah. You’d have been smiling too.’

‘Just never think of you as the party type,’ he continued, and she felt herself starting to tense up. This, she thought, this was why she didn’t want to get back together with him. Having a baby had changed her; it had changed everything about her. Leaving school had changed her again. Being single after three years in a couple had changed her. She wasn’t the soft, romantic girl she’d been before she got pregnant, before he’d walked away and left her to cope on her own. And she knew deep down that that version of Tallulah Murray was the only one that Zach was really interested in being with.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘things change, don’t they?’

‘I guess,’ he said, and there was a note of sadness in his voice.

At a few minutes before midnight, they took the champagne out of the fridge and a pair of wine glasses and went into the garden. The next-door neighbour’s cat sat on the fence, curled into its haunches, eyeing them curiously before turning to look up into the sky. It was cold and Tallulah shivered slightly. They’d had a couple of beers by then and when Zach put his arm around her shoulders to warm her up she didn’t shake him off. They used their phones to count down to midnight and Zach popped the cork and they heard people all around them cheer, and cars hoot their horns and fireworks pop and splutter in the blackness of the sky and they held their glasses of champagne aloft and said Happy New Year to each other and hugged. As they pulled away from each other, Zach looked as if he was about to kiss her and she thought, no. No, I don’t want to kiss you. I’m not sure I’m ever going to want to kiss you again.

‘Oh fuck, Tallulah,’ Zach said. ‘I wish I’d never done what I did last year. It’s, like, the greatest regret of my life. You know that, don’t you?’

She nodded.

‘Will you ever forgive me?’ He threaded her hands into his.

‘I already forgave you,’ she said. ‘I forgave you ages ago.’

‘Then why?’ he said. ‘Why can’t we start over?’

‘I just … I don’t know, I just don’t feel like I want a relationship right now. Noah, he’s enough for me.’

She felt his grip tighten around her fingers.

‘But Noah,’ he said, ‘he’s ours, we made him, that makes us a union, a team. It’s not just about our relationship any more, is it? It’s about all three of us.’

‘You get to see him all the time.’

‘Yeah,’ he sighed, impatiently, ‘I know that, but it’s not the same, not the same as being with him twenty-four-seven. As a family.’

‘Yes, and that’s not what I’m saying. Obviously it would be better for Noah if you were here all the time. But I don’t know if …’ She paused, buying time to find exactly the right words. ‘… if it’s right for me.’

He laughed, slightly dismissively. ‘Lula,’ he said, ‘for fuck’s sake. We’ve known each other since we were fourteen. We know we’re right for each other. Everyone knows we’re right for each other. Please. Give me a chance.’

‘But where would we even live?’

‘Here!’ he said. ‘We could live here. You’ve got that big bed. Your mum loves me. Ryan loves me. I tell you what, tell you what,’ he countered quickly, clearly sensing her lack of enthusiasm for the idea. ‘Let’s do a trial run, yeah? Maybe I could stay over one night. Nothing like that,’ he reassured her. ‘I’d sleep on the floor. Imagine Noah’s face in the morning, waking up and seeing Dad there. And I could do his morning feed and let you have a lie-in. Yeah? Wouldn’t that be good?’

He smiled down at her, using her hands to pull her closer to him so that their stomachs just about touched, their faces just an inch or two apart, his eyes boring deep into hers. ‘Wouldn’t it?’ he said again, kissing her knuckles, looking at her coquettishly, a lazy half-smile on his lips.

And something inside her gave way at that moment, a kind of sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach paired with a swoon in her groin, a feeling of wanting to be touched by someone, but not by Zach, of wanting to be wanted but wanting to be left alone, all at the same time; and she saw Zach’s mouth move towards hers and found herself moving towards him and then they were kissing and all her misgivings fell away in a moment, all her ambivalence crystallised into a single longing for him, for it, for flesh, for limbs and mouths and all of it. Within a moment she was against the back wall, her arms and legs wrapped around him, and it was all over in under a minute and it was what she wanted, it was what she wanted so much, and he carried her afterwards, still inside her, her arms and legs still wrapped around him and twirled her round and round the garden, and she was smiling, properly smiling, the blood pumping through her, the moon shining down from the velvet sky and when Zach said, ‘I love you Lula, I love you so much,’ she didn’t stop for even a second before replying that she loved him too.

Because right then, for that moment in time, she really did.