The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
33
March 2017
Scarlett returns to Manton College at the beginning of March. Tallulah watches her mother dropping her off in a black Tesla, sees the suggestion in the driver’s seat of black sunglasses on top of dark shiny hair, gems glinting on clawed fingers gripping a leather steering wheel, and then the unmistakeable outline of Scarlett emerging from the passenger seat, her hood up, her shoulders slumped. The door slams, the Tesla pulls away and Scarlett’s eyes meet Tallulah’s.
‘Hello, you.’
Tallulah feels her stomach churn at the sight of her. It’s been ten days since their sleepover and she’s been avoiding Scarlett’s calls, her text messages, her Snapchats, her voicemails, the slightly unhinged sequences of GIFs of people dancing, begging, kissing, jumping, spinning, hugging that make no sense whatsoever. She’s ignored the sad-face selfies, the photos of Toby the dog accompanied by the words Where do go nice hooman? She keeps her phone on silent at all times so that Zach doesn’t wonder what on earth is going on.
‘Er,’ she begins, ‘hi?’
‘It’s my mum,’ Scarlett begins. ‘She said if I didn’t come back she was going to send me to live with my grandma. So she made a call and here I am.’
Tallulah shuffles slightly on the spot. It’s a bitterly cold morning and there are spots of freezing rain in the air that sting where they hit the skin on the backs of her hands. She shoves them into the pockets of her coat and says, ‘Sorry I didn’t reply to anything.’
Scarlett shrugs but doesn’t respond.
‘It’s Zach. You know. He’s always there.’
‘You could have come on Sunday. When he does his football.’
Scarlett sounds brittle, less of her usual bluster and volume.
‘He’s still cross about that Friday night.’ Tallulah hates the sound of the words on her lips. They make her sound so pathetic.
‘Who cares?’ Scarlett responds. ‘Who cares what Zach thinks? You’re eighteen, Tallulah. You’re not an old married woman. Just tell him that you don’t care. Tell him to fuck himself.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not? What do you think would happen?’
‘Nothing,’ she says, thinking of the feel of his fists around her wrists, the way he tugs on her hair just a little too hard sometimes. ‘Nothing.’
They walk together towards the college grounds and for a while they are silent. Then Scarlett says, ‘So, what’s the deal with you and me?’
Tallulah glances around, making sure that they are not within earshot of anyone.
‘I don’t know. I—’ She stops and turns to face Scarlett and talks to her in a hushed whisper. ‘I don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t know what to think.’
‘Well, running away from it isn’t going to help you work it out.’
‘I know. I just … I need time. It’s all new to me.’
Scarlett’s face softens. ‘I was lying about my mum, by the way. She didn’t make me come back to college. I asked to come back.’
Tallulah looks at her curiously.
‘I just thought, this way we could hang out. Without, you know, Zach the Ballsack telling you what you can and can’t do.’
Tallulah stifles a laugh. Zach the Ballsack. Then she says, more seriously, ‘I have to go now. I’m already late.’
‘I’ll see you at lunchtime then, maybe, in the canteen? Yeah?’
Tallulah feels the resolve she’s spent the past week building up start to crack and crumble under Scarlett’s bright-eyed assumption that they are going to meet for lunch, that they are going to become something.
‘Scarlett,’ she says as Scarlett turns to go.
‘Yes.’
Tallulah lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘This,’ she says. Gesturing between the two of them with a hand. ‘This is secret, yes? Just us? Nobody else?’
Scarlett nods and puts two fingers to her cheek side by side. ‘Scout’s honour,’ she whispers. ‘You and me. Nobody else.’ Then she moves the fingers down to her mouth and kisses them, before turning them towards Tallulah and blowing on them. She mouths the words See you later, and goes.
For the next few weeks, Tallulah and Scarlett develop a routine of sorts. On Mondays Scarlett’s mum brings her into college on her way to her yoga class at the leisure centre and she and Tallulah meet outside college and walk in together. On Wednesdays and Thursdays Scarlett meets Tallulah at the bus stop in Upfield Common and they take the back seat and they talk and they talk and they talk. At lunchtime sometimes they sit in the canteen, where Tallulah plays the role of Scarlett’s quiet new friend. The others, Mimi, Roo, Jayden and Rocky, talk over her and act as if she isn’t there. She doesn’t blame them as she is trying so very hard not to be noticed or thought of in any way as significant in Scarlett’s life.
On Monday afternoons, when Tallulah and Scarlett both finish early and Zach works late, they meet on the corner of the next road down after classes and go to the funny little tea shop on the high street where all the old ladies go but none of the kids from college, and they order slices of homemade carrot cake and mugs of tea and they sit in a booth right at the back where they can stare into each other’s eyes and fiddle with each other’s hands and grab each other’s legs underneath the table and no one can see, and even if they could see they wouldn’t have anyone to share it with because nobody in the tea shop knows who they are.
And then on Sundays, while Zach is playing football and Scarlett’s mum is at the leisure centre in Manton meeting a friend to go swimming, Tallulah borrows her mum’s bike and cycles through the country lanes with her heart full of anticipation and nerves and excitement and glee, and Scarlett meets her at the door of Dark Place and they stumble upwards, quickly, hotly, madly, to Scarlett’s bedroom and fall on to her bed and Tallulah feels all the things that anchor her down all week long melt away into the golden places where they meet in the middle. They say things into each other’s ears with warm breath and soft lips, they fold themselves together and they block out the world with each other, and afterwards Tallulah doesn’t want to shower, doesn’t want to wash the beautiful stain of Scarlett’s touch off her flesh, so she goes home to her boyfriend and her baby, still smelling of Scarlett’s mouth, Scarlett’s bedding, Scarlett’s old-fashioned French perfume that her aunt gives her every year for her birthday because she once told her she liked it when she was five years old. And nobody notices. Not even Zach who now accepts Tallulah’s new hobby: her Sunday-morning cycle around country lanes, to get fit, to help her lose her baby belly. He thinks what he can smell is the smell of Tallulah’s exercise. He thinks the flush in her cheeks is down to country air.
Tallulah can feel herself begin to blossom and grow during these weeks, as winter turns to spring. Her life now brings her two sources of joy. Her baby boy. Her secret girlfriend. The days grow longer, the nights grow warmer, Noah gets bigger and learns how to hug, Scarlett dyes her hair lilac and has Tallulah’s initials tattooed on the side of her foot.
tm
‘If anyone asks,’ she says, ‘I’ll say it stands for ‘trademark’.’
But Zach is still in Tallulah’s life and Zach is not a source of joy.
He’s working extra hours at the builders’ depot, desperate to grow a nest egg of money so that they can get their own place together. He has a spreadsheet and demands that Tallulah sit down every evening to look at it with him.
‘Look,’ he says, pointing at figures, scrolling up and down. ‘If I can get the promotion to assistant aisle manager next month, that’d be an extra sixty-eight a week. Plus overtime. Plus my mum says she can lend us a couple of thousand, so I reckon by the summer, look … we’d have 13,559 pounds. In the bank. And obviously we’d end up in a shared ownership, most likely, but there are some really nice ones, just outside Reigate. Look.’ And then he switches screens to a new tab where he has the details of some tiny, boxy flats with no outside space for Noah, miles and miles away from here, from her mum, from Manton, from Scarlett, and Tallulah nods and makes a smile and says, ‘They look really cute,’ and all the while she is thinking, No, no, no. No, I do not want to live there with you.
Instead, she is thinking of a world without Zach in it, trying to imagine the contours of that world, how smooth and perfect it would be just to exist for Noah and for Scarlett, not to have to exist for anyone else.
At the beginning of April, when she is nineteen years and old and Zach is nineteen years old and they have had their joint party – a subdued affair at an American-themed restaurant in Manton, just family, not friends, saving money for the flat that Tallulah has no intention of ever moving into, for the life that she has no intention of ever living – Zach books a viewing at one of the flats on his shortlist for Saturday morning.
He’s buzzing with it all that morning as he showers and dresses.
‘Nineteen years old,’ he says. ‘Nineteen years old and about to buy his first property. Ha!’
Tallulah’s mum drives them to the development and they all peer through the windows at the half-built blocks of flats lined up alongside the A25. They are constructed from a kind of off-black brick, with areas of dark grey plastic cladding designed to look like wood. Each block is built around a courtyard lined with tiny saplings encircled with wooden fencing and new baby grass covered in netting. A woman in a glass office greets them effusively, and expresses wonder at their young age, at the cuteness of Noah and excitement at the concept of their very first home.
She takes them to see three units. They’re all icy cold and smell of paint and laminate glue and their voices echo when they speak. One has views across the A25, the next has views across the central courtyard, and the last across the scrappy edges of Reigate’s suburbs. The kitchens are shiny and white, designed to emulate the huge glossy kitchens of rich people’s mansions, but a tenth of the size. Around the bathtub there are metro tiles in shiny dark grey to match the cladding on the outside of the building. It’s all very smart. It’s all very modern. It’s all so very not what Tallulah wants. But her mum makes all sorts of positive noises and a conversation buzzes around her head between Zach, the saleswoman and her mum about the layouts, the potential, which would be Noah’s room, what colour you could paint the walls, the local area, the new supermarket about to open in the retail development across the way, and Tallulah feels numb and scared that she is letting this happen to her; angry that she is nineteen years old and in love with Scarlett Jacques, but looking at flats in a cold block with a man she wishes was dead.
In the car on the way home she sits in the back and holds Noah’s hand as he sleeps. In the front Zach and her mother are chatting. After a moment her mother turns to Tallulah and says, ‘What did you think, sweetie?’
‘They were nice.’
‘Which one did you like best?’
‘The one facing the courtyard,’ she replies dutifully, as she knows that’s the one Zach likes the best and it will draw the conversation away from her.
In bed that night, in the warm, airless space between Noah’s and Zach’s sleeping bodies, Tallulah decides that when she sees Scarlett the next day she is going to tell her about Noah. She is going to tell Scarlett that she is a mother, that she has had a baby, that the stretch marks Scarlett has run her fingertips over are not because she ‘used to be fat’ but because she once grew an 8-lb 2-oz baby inside her. And then she is going to ask her to stop being her secret girlfriend, and be her real girlfriend, and she is going to tell her mother, and she is going to tell Zach, and she is going to stop her life veering off into this place of flats on A roads and controlling boyfriends and secrets. She is going to own her destiny, own her identity; she is going to be true and real and honest, her best, most authentic and pure self.
The following day she watches Zach leave with his football kit bag over his shoulder from her bedroom window and she throws her things into her bag, runs down to the kitchen, kisses Noah and her mother, grabs the bike from the side return, straps on her helmet and cycles as she never cycled before to Dark Place.
But at the front door she sees another bike, leaning up against the place where she normally leaves hers. She glances around herself, but can see no sign of anyone. Maybe, she thinks, it’s the gardener, maybe it’s a cleaner or someone come to skim leaves off their swimming pool. She rings the doorbell, her heart pattering under her rib cage with the exertion of cycling so fast, the anticipation of seeing Scarlett, and the door opens and there is Scarlett, still in her pyjamas, her hair scraped back into a spiky bun, and there is a young man, in jeans and an old-fashioned navy-blue jumper with a high zipped neck.
Scarlett looks at Tallulah and then at the man, and then she says, ‘Lules. This is Liam. Liam, this is Tallulah.’
Tallulah throws Scarlett a questioning look. She sees Scarlett’s hand go to her neck to cover a mark. She sees that under her pyjama top she is braless. She looks at Liam, who eyes her strangely before saying, ‘Nice to meet you.’
He has bare feet and his shoes are nowhere to be seen.
‘Liam came over last night,’ Scarlett says, her hand still clutching her neck. ‘I was having a freak-out and my mum was out. He decided – well, we—’
‘It was me, really,’ Liam chips in. ‘I decided to stay over because we had a bit to drink—’
‘Yes. It was safer. So, he stayed.’
‘Yes. I stayed. And now,’ he says, ‘I’m going, if only I could remember where I put my shoes.’ He starts to wander about the hallway, hunting for his shoes, and Tallulah looks at Scarlett.
‘What the hell?’ Tallulah whispers.
Scarlett shrugs. ‘I’m not allowed to call you. So I called him.’
Tallulah peels Scarlett’s fingers away from her neck and sees the tell-tale grey-red graze of a love bite.
Scarlett’s fingers snap straight back to the spot. ‘It was a messy night,’ she says. ‘We didn’t have sex. We just … you know …’
Tallulah opens her mouth to say something, but seeing Liam reappear clutching a pair of brown leather hiking boots, she closes it again. She feels tears pulsing through her sinuses. She wants to cry and she wants to be sick. They stand in silence until Liam has laced up his boots and is ready to leave. She watches him lean in to kiss Scarlett briefly on her cheek. Scarlett clears her throat and smiles tightly and says, ‘Thanks for coming. You’re a star.’
‘Bye, Tallulah,’ he says, ‘lovely to meet you.’
‘Yes,’ she says in a tight, high voice, ‘you too.’
And then he is gone and it is just her and Scarlett in the hallway. Scarlett comes towards her to touch her and Tallulah flinches.
Scarlett tuts. ‘I swear,’ she says, ‘it was nothing. It was just, you know, he’s Liam. Me and him. We’ve got a history. And we drank far too much and it was just silly, you know, mucking about.’
Tallulah can’t think of any words. She stands with her arms folded and she glares at the floor.
‘I mean, come on, Tallulah. You aren’t really in a position to judge. You live with your fucking boyfriend. And don’t tell me you don’t have sex with him, because I know you do.’
Tallulah thinks of the snatched moments she offers up to Zach because she knows that if they can get it out of the way he won’t ask her at a moment that’s even worse. She’ll say, ‘Come on, Mum’s taking Noah to the pond, we’ve got five minutes. But be quick.’ And then he would be quick and she could buy herself another two weeks of him not pestering her, of not having to think about it. So yes, they have sex, but no, it is nothing compared to the Sunday mornings that she and Scarlett spend in Scarlett’s king-sized bed on her 800-thread-count cotton sheets. Nothing whatsoever.
‘That’s not the same,’ she says.
‘Of course it’s the same. It’s comfort. It’s habit. It’s a way to keep them on side. Because we need to keep them on side.’
‘Whoa.’
‘Whoa, what? Come on, Lules. You know it’s true. Your Zach, what is he for? What is it he gives to you which means that you won’t end your relationship with him, that you still sleep with him? There has to be something.’
‘There’s nothing,’ she says. ‘Zach doesn’t give me anything.’
‘So why do you want to stay with him?’
‘I don’t want to,’ Tallulah says. ‘I want to leave him. But we’ve been together since were children. He’s the only man I’ve ever …’ She stops briefly as tears come to her eyes. ‘I sleep with him because I have to. For reasons you could never begin to imagine. But what about you? You didn’t have to do whatever you did last night with Liam. You’re not in a relationship with him. He knows you don’t love him, that it’s over. So why?’
Scarlett sighs and throws Tallulah an infuriatingly gentle look. ‘Just … because?’
‘Because?’
‘Look, I’m not really … I mean I can prioritise people but never entirely limit them.’
‘Limit them?’
‘Yes, so, like, you’re my priority. You are one hundred per cent the most important person in my life, like, ever, probably. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be other people in my life. Who aren’t as important as you. Who I don’t feel about the way I feel about you. But who are there, and who I am not going to get rid of.’
‘You mean, you don’t do monogamy?’
‘I guess, if you want to put it that way. But honestly. Please. Just forget about that.’ She gestures at the front door. ‘Let’s start over. Come on. There’re pecan Danishes in the kitchen. They’re from yesterday but they’re still really, really good. Please. I’ve missed you so much …’
The thought of sitting on the blue sofa in Scarlett’s huge glass kitchen and licking the icing off a pecan Danish under a furry blanket and then finding the angles of Scarlett’s body in her bedroom and sitting together with the dog afterwards discussing which bits of him they like the best feels like all she wants in the whole world. But that’s not what she came here to do. She’d come to hand herself to Scarlett, all 100 per cent of herself. And now she knows that she will never have 100 per cent of Scarlett, that Scarlett will always have intimate gaps and spaces where other people fit in, and that is not what she wants for herself, or for Noah, or for her future. And she realises that she has never been more than an experience for Scarlett, just as Liam had been. An experiment. A thing to do to try and decide if she likes it or not, so that one day she can tell whoever she decides she wants to spend her life with that when she was young she tried out a posh farmer boy with a penchant for zip-neck jumpers, and then when she tired of that she tried out a village girl from a cul-de-sac who was training to be a social worker. And that after her there would be someone or something else.
So she looks at Scarlett with tear-filled eyes and says, ‘No. I’m going home. Forget it. Forget this. I’m worth more.’
She slams Scarlett’s door behind her and mounts her bike, cycles hard all the way home, her eyes blinded with tears, thinking of her last words to Scarlett and wondering if they were even true.