The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

30

February 2017

Scarlett messages Tallulah later that night. The phone chirrups in her hand as she sits next to Zach on the sofa and she feels his eyes search out the screen of her phone. She switches it off quickly when she sees Scarlett’s name.

‘Who was that?’

‘No one,’ she says. ‘Just Chloe.’

‘What does Chloe want?’

‘I dunno. Probably just wants to talk shit about people.’

She feels him bristling with questions he wants to ask, but her mum is there and Zach is always sweetness and light when her mum is around.

She has to wait twenty minutes for Zach to leave the room before she can check the message. She puts the phone on the sofa and switches it on there so that she can easily tuck it out of sight if Zach comes back.

Yo T from the B. Can u come round after college on Friday? My mum’s out of town for the night. You cld sleep over maybe?

She switches it off, feeling her heart racing beneath her ribs. Scarlett believes Tallulah to be your average eighteen-year-old girl, the type who can come and go at her own pace, the kind with no commitments. And now Tallulah thinks of this other version of herself, the one with no commitments, and she imagines that other Tallulah thinking, Well, I don’t have college the next day, I could go over to Scarlett’s, we could have a few drinks, stay up late, eat cereal with hangovers the next morning in her big glossy kitchen. Suddenly, she wants this other Tallulah’s life more than anything in the world. She turns her head to the door of the living room, checking for Zach, but there’s no sign of him, so she taps the screen of her phone, as quicky as she can:

Maybe. Yeh. I’ll c what I can do.

For the rest of that week, Tallulah builds a story about Chloe. Chloe, she tells her mother, is being bullied by a group of kids from college. Chloe can’t tell her mother what’s happening because Chloe’s mother would just make things worse. Chloe is feeling suicidal. Chloe has been talking about slitting her wrists.

Her mother tells her that she really should tell someone, someone at the college maybe. Tallulah says no, Chloe would definitely not want her to talk to the college, that she doesn’t want anyone to talk to the college.

And then, at about four o’clock on Friday afternoon, Tallulah tells her mother that Chloe has just called and that she is in crisis and that she needs her and that she is going to her house. ‘Can you look after Noah,’ she asks her mum, ‘just until Zach gets back from work? Is that OK?’

Her mother nods fervently. ‘Of course, yes, of course. But please stay in touch. Let me know if you need me to do anything. Call me, please, if it looks like she’s going to do anything stupid.’

She touches Tallulah’s cheek and says, ‘You’re such a kind person, such a good friend. I’m so proud of you.’

Tallulah feels so guilty she almost wants to throw up. She leaves before she betrays herself in any way, leaves without even saying goodbye to Noah. She passes Chloe’s cottage on the way out of the village and stops, just for a moment, just in case someone is watching, just so they could say, Oh yes, I saw Tallulah outside Chloe’s house. In the pockets of her jacket are a spare pair of underwear, a toothbrush and her debit card.

She waits for a minute or two and then carries on cycling. Zach will be on the bus heading back along this road on his way home from work in just over an hour, so she keeps her hood up and sticks to the shadows and the pavements where they veer off the edge of the road between avenues of trees. She turns off the main road with a sigh of relief; then she cycles to the gates of Dark Place and messages Scarlett.

I’m here,she types. I’m outside.

‘You look pretty,’ says Scarlett, wheeling her bike away for her and tucking it out of sight behind the garage.

‘Er, no,’ Tallulah replies. ‘I do not look pretty. I literally came straight here and haven’t even looked in a mirror.’

‘Well, I have two good eyes in my head and they both see pretty.’

Tallulah smiles and follows Scarlett into the house.

Toby greets them in the hallway and joins them in the seating area in the big kitchen extension.

‘How was college?’ asks Scarlett.

‘I didn’t go today. I only go three times a week.’

‘Oh,’ says Scarlett. ‘How come?’

‘Just the way the course works,’ Tallulah replies, not mentioning that she’d worked closely with the course director to construct a timetable that fitted around her other role as a parent.

‘So you study at home the rest of the time?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s cool,’ Scarlett replies. ‘Do you have your own room?’

‘Yeah,’ she says again. Technically it’s not a lie. Technically it is her own room. She just happens to be sharing it with her boyfriend and an eight-month-old baby.

‘What’s your house like?’

‘It’s … I dunno. It’s just like, a house. You know. A door, some windows, a staircase, some rooms. It’s not like …’ She spreads her arm in an arc across the extraordinary glass structure they’re sitting within.

‘Yeah, well, not much is like this place, I guess.’

‘What was it like, your old house? In Guernsey?’

‘Oh, you know. Pretty spectacular too. Right on a cliff’s edge. Overlooking the sea. We still own it.’

‘Wow,’ says Tallulah, shaking her head slowly at the concept of owning not one, but two properties as incredible as this.

‘Plus there’s my dad’s apartment in Bloomsbury.’

‘He has an apartment in London?’

‘Yeah. A penthouse with views over the British Museum. It’s really cool.’

Tallulah shakes her head again. ‘What’s it like to be so rich?’ she asks.

Scarlett smiles and rises to her feet. ‘It’s nice, I suppose. But, you know, it would also be nice to have a father who wants to live with you and a mother who likes you and a brother who doesn’t always have something better to be doing. It would be nice just to be a normal family. Like the ones on Gogglebox. You know.’ She points at the drinks cabinet behind her and says, ‘Rum? Or is it too early?’

Tallulah looks at the time on the oversized clock hanging on the wall beside her. It’s five o’clock. Zach will be leaving work now. In about forty-five minutes or thereabouts he’ll get home and Tallulah’s mum will explain to him where Tallulah is and he will try calling her and she will have to ignore his call and then send him a lie in a text message. She doesn’t want to be drunk then. She needs to keep a clear head.

‘Six o’clock would be better,’ she says.

Scarlett smiles. ‘You’, she says, turning away from the drinks cabinet, ‘are a good influence. I had a feeling you might be. Cup of tea?’

‘Cup of tea would be lovely.’

The sky is starting to darken. Tallulah sees it growing bruises across the top of the trees behind the house, feels the night start to close down her options.

‘Will you stay over?’ asks Scarlett, as if reading her thoughts.

‘I don’t know yet. Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’ she responds, teasingly.

‘Yes, maybe.’ Tallulah smiles and realises she’s doing something she’s never done before in her life. She’s flirting. She wonders at this for a moment, as she stares at the outline of Scarlett’s body, the jutting angles of it, the long stretch of off-white wrist visible below the turned-up cuff of her scruffy sweatshirt, the tight lines of cartilage and bone pressing at the skin. She looks at the bobbles on Scarlett’s sports socks, the patches of dog hair on the knees of her joggers. She looks at the way her hair is hanging halfway out of a towelling scrunchy. She looks at the large spot on her jawline and notes that her lips look dry and she needs to put some balm on them. She looks at a girl who is too thin and too scruffy and might not have had a shower this morning and maybe not even this week. She sees a girl who drinks rum when she’s alone and cuts off friendships when they threaten to overwhelm her and boyfriends when they’re too good for her. She sees a girl who’s on the edge of oblivion, maybe looking for something to hold on to and she knows somehow that that thing is her.

‘Well,’ says Scarlett, topping up the kettle from the tap. ‘I’ll have to see what I can do to persuade you then.’

‘Where’s your mum?’

‘Date night with Dad in London. She drops in on him unannounced whenever she suspects there might be someone hanging around. You know.’

‘You mean, having an affair?’

‘Yes. That sort of thing.’

‘And is he?’

‘Having an affair?’ She shrugs. ‘Fuck knows. Probably. He’s rich and old. Rich old men get mega muff.’ She sniffs and puts the kettle back on its base. ‘Whatever. I don’t care. It’s just old-people stuff.’

They sit with their mugs of tea and Scarlett puts a playlist through the Sonos speaker system and they chat for a while about their lives, their parents, their plans. At some point it gets entirely dark and Tallulah is quietly surprised when her phone buzzes.

She turns it over, glances at the screen, sees Zach’s name, locks the screen, turns the phone over.

‘Who was that?’

‘No one,’ she replies.

A few seconds later her phone buzzes again. This time she picks it up and says, ‘Sorry, I should probably get this.’

Zach’s message says:

Chloe isn’t yr problem. Tell her to call the Samaritans. I need you. Noah needs you.

She pauses for a moment before replying.

I’ll be here as long as it takes. Might stay the night. Please don’t message me again.

Her phone starts to ring the moment she locks the screen again. She declines the call and puts the phone on silent. Adrenaline pumps through her, sickeningly. She breathes in hard to bring her heart back to normal.

‘Trouble?’ Scarlett asks.

‘No,’ she replies. ‘It’s nothing.’

She glances up at the huge clock on the wall again. It says five fifty-one.

‘Rum o’clock?’ she says, tipping an eyebrow at Scarlett.

‘Hell yeah,’ says Scarlett, leaping to her feet and heading to the cabinet. ‘Hell yeah.’

Tallulah wakes the following day in the custard-yellow light of the early-morning sun filtered through thick cream curtains. Her phone tells her that it is seven fifteen. On the pillow to her left is one of Scarlett’s feet; soft white skin, perfect toenails painted black, done by a professional, belying the rough-and-ready image she tries so hard to portray. Tallulah stares at the toenails, imagines her at the fancy nail place near Manton Station with the pink walls and the glittery cushions, her phone in her hand, her feet extended in a leather chair towards a masked girl from Vietnam.

Tallulah has never had a manicure or a pedicure. She would feel too embarrassed.

Her hangover starts to leak into her system as she pulls herself up to sitting. She checks the messages on her phone. Thirteen from Zach. She doesn’t bother reading them. One from her mum, sent at 2 a.m.

Just checking in. Hope all’s OK with Chloe. Zach told me you were sleeping over. All good with Noah, Love you, Mum.

She slowly unpeels herself from the heavy down of Scarlett’s duvet and slides off her huge king-size bed, her feet landing on soft sheepskin. Scarlett’s head is buried under the bottom end of the duvet, just a small tuft of blue hair visible. A memory blasts through Tallulah’s head, her fingers in that mop of blue, her lips on those lips, Scarlett’s hand …

She shakes her head, hard. Really hard.

No, she thinks. No, no, no.

That hadn’t happened.

Her mind is playing tricks on her.

She glances at Scarlett again, at the shape of her, upside down, under the duvet. Why is she upside down?

Then she remembers, she remembers pushing Scarlett’s hand away last night, pulling away from her lips, taking her hand from her hair, saying the words, ‘No, that’s not who I am.’

Scarlett had pulled back and looked her hard in the eye and said, ‘Well, then, who the hell are you, Tallulah from the bus?’

And Tallulah had shaken her head and said, ‘I’m just me.’

Scarlett had put a finger against her narrow lips, run it across the place where Tallulah’s own lips had just rested, sighed and said, ‘Ah, well. There you go. Timing is everything.’

Tallulah didn’t know what she’d meant by that. But she knew that she’d asked Scarlett to call her a taxi, that she wanted to go home, and that Scarlett had said, ‘Don’t be stupid, it’s two in the morning, stay.’ She’d pressed her hand against her heart and said, ‘We’ll sleep top to toe. OK?’

Now Tallulah sighs and tiptoes from the room, picking up her jeans and her phone.

In the white marble bathroom, she messages her mum.

Just woken up. All good. I’ll be home in half an hour. How’s Noah?

Her mother replies immediately.

He’s fine. He’s just had his breakfast. No rush. Stay as long as you need to stay. Come back when you’re ready.

She replies with three love-heart emojis in a row, and then, with a heavy heart she opens Zach’s messages:

This is bullshit.

You don’t have time for me, but you have time for her?

Noah is crying for you.

Call yourself a mum?

You don’t get to do this!

Fuck’s sake, fucking get fucking home, I’m serious.

What the fuck are you playing at?

Fuck you, Tallulah, fuck you …

In between are brief voice recordings of Noah crying. Behind the sound of her son’s tears are the sounds of Zach soothing him in whispers, It’s OK, little man, it’s OK. Mum’s with someone she cares about more than you, but don’t you worry, little man, Dad’s here for you and Dad loves you, don’t you ever forget that …

She glances up at the sound of a creaking floorboard outside the bathroom and quickly locks her phone.

‘Lula?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You OK?’

‘I’m good. Just on the toilet.’

‘Thought I heard a baby crying.’

‘Weird,’ Tallulah says quietly.

There’s a beat of silence and she hears the floorboard creaking again. Then Scarlett says, ‘Yeah. Weird.’

They eat their breakfast together, just as Tallulah had imagined they would. Bare legs, oversized T-shirts, smudged eyeliner, thick breath. The sky outside is dirty grey, full of snow about to fall. The big glass box at the back of the house feels chilly. Scarlett throws her a fake fur throw when she sees her shivering.

This is where Scarlett had kissed her the night before. Right here. Tallulah puts a hand out to touch the square of leather she’d been sitting on when Scarlett had slid towards her last night, put a hand to her face and said, ‘Don’t you know how beautiful you are?’

She remembers the shiver of energy that had passed through her as she realised what was happening.

‘I’m not …’ she’d said quietly, the words almost a gasp.

‘Not what?’

She didn’t reply because she couldn’t. She didn’t know what she was. All she knew was that when she was with Scarlett she felt as though she could be anyone she wanted to be.

Now Scarlett smiles at her indulgently. ‘God,’ she says. ‘You are such a cutie.’

Tallulah smiles and says, ‘You’re so weird.’ Then she drops her smile and says, ‘Have you ever … I mean, are you, like, gay?’

‘Labels,’ says Scarlett, faux-theatrically. ‘Boring, idiotic labels.’

‘Well, then, am I the first girl …?’

‘Yes. You are the first girl. Oh,’ she says, suddenly, putting her hand to her cheek, ‘apart from all the other girls.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Really. But you’re the first girl for a long time. A long, long time.’

Tallulah’s phone buzzes. She looks at it vaguely. It’s another message from Zach.

What the fuck, Tallulah?

It buzzes again. This time it’s a photo. It’s Noah. Zach’s face is pressed close to his and he looks angry.

For a moment Tallulah feels scared. Zach looks like he could hurt Noah. She gets to her feet and then sits down again. No, she thinks, no. Zach would never hurt Noah. Never. He’s just using Noah to control her.

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah. I’m just … my boyfriend.’

‘Is he giving you grief?’

‘Yeah. A bit.’

‘Can’t cope with you having your own life away from him?’

‘That kind of thing.’

Scarlett rolls her eyes. ‘Men,’ she says. ‘They’re such losers.’ She leans forward towards Tallulah and fixes her with her pale grey eyes. ‘Whatever you do,’ she says, ‘don’t let him play you. OK? Stick to your guns. Stay strong.’

Tallulah nods. She’d already decided that that was what she would do.

‘You go to him now, and he’s won, and the next time it’ll be just that bit easier for him to control you. Yeah?’

She nods again.

Scarlett leans back again. ‘Good girl,’ she says. ‘Good girl.’

And as she says these words, Tallulah feels something bubble up inside her, something hot and liquid and raw and red and it rushes from her groin through her heart to her limbs and she jumps to her feet and she strides towards Scarlett and she straddles her with her bare legs against hers, and she kisses her.