The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

17

January 2017

Zach spends the night with Tallulah on New Year’s Eve and never goes home. When Tallulah wakes up for her first day back at college five days later, she awakes in a bed shared with her baby and her baby’s father. She and Zach haven’t had sex again since New Year’s Eve, but they sit side by side on the sofa at night and they kiss each other goodbye and hello and they hug and they touch.

Tallulah’s mum is pleased. Tallulah knows that she’s always felt guilty for marrying a man who wasn’t cut out for the hurly-burly of family life, who ran back home to his mum the minute she said she needed him and left them all behind without a glimmer of remorse. And Tallulah can tell that she is pleased that Tallulah and Zach are going to make a go of being a proper family and that Zach is going to relieve some of the pressure on Tallulah as a single parent.

Tallulah kisses her mum goodbye on her first day back at college. In the front garden she looks up and sees Zach and Noah at her bedroom window, Zach holding Noah’s tiny hand up and waving it for him. She sees him mouthing, ‘Bye-bye, Mummy. Bye-bye, Mummy.’ She blows them kisses and then walks away.

At the bus stop she finds herself looking for Scarlett. Scarlett never appeared at the bus stop again after that first time and Tallulah didn’t see her to talk to after the Christmas party but for some reason Scarlett has left an imprint on Tallulah’s psyche. Their two interludes feel important to Tallulah, and she feels like something is meant to happen now, a third act, a conclusion of some sort. The bus arrives; she takes one last look across the common, towards Maypole House, sighs and gets on board.

After lunch that day Tallulah decides to visit the art block. She’s never been in the art block before; it’s a squat square building in the middle of campus, kind of ugly. The corridors inside are decorated with rows of slightly alarming self-portraits. She finds a door towards the end of a corridor that says Year One Fine Arts and peers through the window. The room is empty but locked. She passes through more corridors lined with more art and then finds one that is labelled as ‘Scarlett Jacques Y1’.

Tallulah stops. It’s a portrait of Scarlett in a crop T-shirt and oversized shorts draped inside a huge red velvet throne-like chair, wearing a tiara at an angle, high-top trainers, her hair scraped back, hoop earrings and wrists layered with rubber bands. At her feet sits a gigantic brown dog, almost the same size as Scarlett, also wearing a crown. Both of them stare directly at the viewer, the dog looking proud, Scarlett looking challenging.

It’s an arresting image; it draws the eye first to Scarlett and then to every other detail: a pile of silver and cream chargers on the floor catching the light, a small window behind with the suggestion of a face, staring as though watching her. There’s a gun on a table, an Apple phone, a dish with a fresh red heart in it that looks as if it’s still beating. On another table there’s a cake with a slice missing and the knife used to cut it has a drop of blood on it.

Tallulah has no idea what any of it means, but it’s beautifully painted, all in sun-bleached shades of pink and green and pale grey with shocking slashes and spots of red. She finds herself mouthing ‘Wow’ to herself.

‘Amazing, isn’t she?’

She turns at the voice behind her. She’d thought she was alone. It’s one of Scarlett’s gang; she can’t remember her name.

‘Yes, I mean, I haven’t seen her work before, but this painting is incredible.’

‘You know she left?’

Tallulah blinks, feels a kind of tightness in her stomach. ‘What?’

‘Scar’s gone. She’s not coming back.’ The girl makes a kind of popping noise with her mouth, as though Scarlett were a bubble that had burst.

‘But why?’

‘No one really knows. I keep messaging her and she keeps saying she’ll tell me when she can, but she can’t tell me right now, so, yeah …’

Tallulah turns back to the painting. ‘What a waste,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ the girl agrees. ‘She’s a fucking idiot. All that work and all that talent and she’s just walked away from it. But there you go. That’s Scar. An enigma. Wrapped in a blanket.’ She smiles. ‘You’re Tallulah from the bus, aren’t you?’

Tallulah nods.

‘Mimi. We met at the Christmas party.’

‘Oh, yeah. Hi.’

Mimi cocks her head at Tallulah and says, ‘Are you doing art?’

Tallulah shakes her head. ‘No, just fancied looking at the art. Someone said it was really good.’

Mimi looks at her curiously for a moment. Then she pulls her heels together, straightens up and says, ‘Anyway, time to get on. And if you see Scarlett around your neck of the woods, tell her to stop being a fucking dick and get in touch, will you?’

Tallulah smiles. ‘I will,’ she says. ‘I promise.’

After that, Tallulah looks for Scarlett every time she leaves the house. She knows that Scarlett’s boyfriend, Liam, is a student at Maypole House, so it’s more than possible that Scarlett would be in the village from time to time. Every now and then Tallulah flicks through her photo roll to get to the picture of her and Scarlett at the Christmas party and tries to remember the way she’d felt that night, the person she was when she was under the red-hot glow of Scarlett’s attention. She googles Scarlett’s name from time to time too, idly, just in case she’s ended up in the newspapers somehow. She doesn’t know where Scarlett lives, just that it’s somewhere walking distance from the village, which could be anywhere; there are at least three hamlets near Upfield Common and the roads between are peppered with private driveways leading to the sorts of big houses that Tallulah imagines Scarlett to live in.

And then one day, during the last week of January, Tallulah sees Scarlett getting out of the passenger seat of a Smart car parked outside the Co-op on the high street of the village.

She’s wearing what look like pyjamas, with her fake fur coat over the top. Her hair is straggly and she’s wearing beaten-up trainers over fluffy socks. In the driver’s seat of the car, Tallulah sees a young man. He’s staring at his phone and there’s the dull thud of music emanating from the car. A moment later Scarlett emerges with a carrier bag and jumps back into the Smart car. The boy in the driver’s seat looks at her briefly, turns his phone off and drives the car towards the road that goes to Manton.

Tallulah stands, watching it disappear as though it might carry some clue as to its final destination. Then she remembers something. Her mum had mentioned a few days ago that she’d seen Keziah, one of Tallulah’s best friends from primary school, working at the Co-op. Tallulah hasn’t seen Keziah for months; last time was when she was just starting to show in her pregnancy and Keziah had put her hand to Tallulah’s bump and made a sound as if she was about to faint because she was so overawed by it.

Keziah’s behind one of the tills when Tallulah walks in a moment later. Her face lights up when she sees her. ‘Lula!’ she says. ‘Where’ve you been hiding?’

Tallulah smiles and shrugs. ‘Tend to do big shops now,’ she says, ‘with the car. Easier with all the nappies and formula, you know.’

Keziah smiles warmly at her. ‘How’s the bubba?’

‘Oh. He’s amazing,’ she replies.

‘Into everything, I bet.’

‘Not yet. He’s too young for that. But he’s mellow anyway, you know. He’s a little Buddha.’

‘At home with your mum?’

‘Well, yeah, my mum. And Zach.’

‘Oh,’ says Keziah. ‘I thought you two had …?’

‘Yeah, we did. And then we got back together again. Around New Year.’

Keziah beams at her. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that’s amazing! I’m so pleased. You two were made for each other.’

Tallulah smiles tightly. ‘It’s nice,’ she says, ‘nice for Noah. And nice to have another pair of hands. You know.’

‘You look really different,’ says Keziah.

‘Do I?’

‘Yeah, you look, kind of, I dunno, really grown up. Really pretty.’

‘Oh,’ says Tallulah. ‘Thank you.’

‘You should come out one night. With me and the girls.’

‘Yes. I’d like that.’ She’s not sure she would like it. She’s always thought there was a reason why she hadn’t stayed in touch with her friends from primary school but has never been quite sure what that reason might be – something deep-seated and subconscious, something that even now makes her feel strange when contemplating the idea of a reunion.

‘That girl’, she says, ‘who just came in wearing pyjamas? Do you know who she is?’

‘The skanky one, you mean?’

Tallulah shakes her head slightly, trying to align the way she sees Scarlett with the way someone else might see her and then she says, ‘Yeah. The one with the furry coat.’

‘Yeah. That’s the girl who lives in Dark Place.’

‘Dark Place?’

‘Yeah, you know, that big old house in Upley Fold?’

She shakes her head.

‘You must know it,’ Keziah says. ‘It’s like the biggest house in the area.’

Tallulah shakes her head again and then says, ‘What did she buy?’

Keziah scoffs a little. ‘Why d’you want to know that?’

‘I dunno. She’s just … I kind of know her from college and she left really mysteriously, no one knows why, and I’m just being nosy, I guess.’

‘She bought rum, rolling tobacco and tampons.’ Keziah rolls her eyes. ‘Such a skank,’ she says.

‘Did she say anything?’

‘You’re kidding me, right? As if someone like her would make conversation with the checkout girl at the Co-op.’ She tuts and then her eyes drift across Tallulah’s shoulder to a customer waiting to be served. ‘Better go,’ she says. ‘Love to the bubba. Bring him in next time, so I can see him. Yeah?’

Tallulah smiles. ‘I will. Promise.’

She walks home slowly, googling Dark Place on her phone with one thumb as she goes. A Wiki page comes up for what looks like a house out of a fairy tale or a ghost story; her eyes scan the text and she catches fragments of a story about coffee plantations and Spanish flu and assassination attempts and people having their eyes pecked out by crows. She wonders why the house isn’t famous or open to the public, how a place like that could just be a family home, the place that Scarlett lives, where she is headed right now with her tobacco and her rum and her packet of tampons.

Curiosity suddenly swamps her and she crouches down to feel through her rucksack for her college planner. She flicks it open to the back page and scans the contacts listed there until her finger hits Scarlett’s name. Before she can change her mind she words an email:

Hi, Scarlett, this is Tallulah from the bus, just checking in, hope you’re OK. See you around, luv T.

She presses send before she changes her mind, puts her planner back in her bag and heads home to her baby.