The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

36

May 2017

Spring wends its way towards summer in a haze of tedious college days and dull nights spent wedged next to Zach on the sofa, the baby monitor blinking on the table at their side. Noah gets to the stage where his head is too big for his body and they joke about how he looks like a bobble-head and have to prop his huge cranium up with cushions when he falls asleep in the back of the car.

The apartment on the Reigate ring road falls through when the bank refuses them a mortgage and Zach goes back to his spreadsheets and his bank statements with an air of dark resentment. It seems that buying a property is the only thing that matters to him now, that being a home-owner at nineteen is some kind of badge of honour that will make him feel like a winner. They’ve taken to having sex on Wednesday afternoons when Zach gets home early, Kim is at work, Ryan is at school and Noah is having his daily nap. It’s the same every time, a practised series of movements that ends, within roughly ten minutes, with Zach orgasming silently with his face pressed into a pillow and Tallulah running on tiptoe to the bathroom afterwards and staring at herself in the mirror wondering who the naked, empty-eyed girl with blotchy breasts looking back at her is. But she also feels a sense of relief, a sense that it is done, that now she has a week in which her body is her own.

The weeks tick by and the days grow longer. Summer exams beckon and Tallulah spends more of her time at home revising and less sitting on the sofa with Zach, who stalks in and out of their bedroom when she’s studying, finding stupid excuses to distract her.

At college, she sees Scarlett nearly every day and they have learned how to ignore each other to the point where Tallulah can sometimes believe that maybe none of it ever happened, that it was all a dream. Scarlett’s friends had never accepted her as part of Scarlett’s life in the first place and happily accept that she is no longer there. They wave at her if they pass on campus, they say, ‘Hi, Lules,’ and Tallulah says hi back. But in the canteen at lunchtime, Tallulah sits with the kids from her Social Care course, or on her own. She and Scarlett have not spoken a word to each other since the Sunday morning when Tallulah arrived to find her with her ex-boyfriend’s teeth marks on her neck. Scarlett sent plaintive WhatsApps and Snaps for a few days, but Tallulah simply deleted them all immediately and then blocked her.

But it doesn’t matter how much time passes or how efficiently they have been able to pretend that they don’t know each other, the feeling of wanting Scarlett is still as raw, as red, as real as it was when they were together. Tallulah aches, physically, when she thinks about the feel of Scarlett’s hand on hers under the table at their secret old-lady cake shop. About those Sunday mornings. When she closes her eyes, she gets flashbacks to the smell of the scented candle in Scarlett’s bedroom, the heat of Scarlett’s mouth on her skin, the flush of her flesh that stayed for hours after she got home. And she wants it all back. But she can’t have it because Tallulah is a mother, she has a child and she has responsibilities and she cannot hand any of that over to the care of someone who doesn’t see that it is wrong to let your ex give you love bites while your current love is on a bike coming to see you. She owes it to Noah to give him stable foundations, and Scarlett is lots of things, but she is not stable.

But then, one sunny Tuesday morning, as Tallulah pushes Noah to the pond in his buggy with a small plastic bag of dry bread slices tucked into the hood of the pram, she sees a familiar figure across the common. Scarlett is at college all day on Tuesdays. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be across the common, staring right at Tallulah.

Tallulah panics. For a moment she thinks she might just turn Noah’s buggy 180 degrees and head home, but Scarlett’s pace has picked up and she is heading straight towards her now, and Tallulah can see her brow is furrowed in confusion, her gaze oscillating between Tallulah and the buggy.

Tallulah lets her head drop into her chest, takes a deep breath and walks to meet Scarlett in the middle of the common.

‘Oh my God, is he yours?’

Tallulah nods. ‘Yes. This is Noah. He’s mine.’

Scarlett stares at her in disbelief. Then she crouches and reaches into the buggy and for a moment Tallulah’s heart starts to race; she thinks maybe Scarlett is going to snatch him, pinch him, hurt him. She pulls the buggy towards herself, but Scarlett is merely greeting Noah.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ she says, rubbing the backs of her fingers against Noah’s cheek. Noah stares at her, wide-eyed but not disturbed. Scarlett’s gaze tips up to Tallulah. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘He’s so beautiful.’

‘Thanks.’

Scarlett issues a nervous laugh. ‘God, Lules. You’re a mummy.’

Tallulah sighs and nods.

‘Why didn’t you fucking tell me?’

‘Could you not,’ Tallulah begins, hating herself for saying it, but needing to say it because the words physically hurt when she’s in front of her baby, ‘could you not swear? Do you mind?’

Scarlett muzzles herself with both her hands. ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s fine. It’s just, he’s at that age, you know, when he’s starting to try and talk. And I couldn’t deal with it if that was his first word. You know.’

Scarlett nods and smiles. ‘God. Yes. Of course.’ She brings herself back to standing and puts her hands in the pockets of a weird patchwork blouson jacket. Her hair is short and messy and she has an outbreak of spots around her mouth. But still she takes Tallulah’s breath away.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks, again.

Tallulah shrugs. ‘I don’t really know.’

‘And so this is why you’re stuck with that loser. I finally understand.’

Tallulah feels her defences rise. ‘He’s not a loser.’

Scarlett shrugs. ‘Whatever.’

They stand and stare at each other for a moment. Noah starts to moan a little and kick his feet. ‘I’m taking him to the pond,’ Tallulah says. She doesn’t add, Do you want to come, but Scarlett follows her anyway.

‘I can’t believe you, Lules. You binned me off because I kissed my ex, and all the while you’ve got a secret fucking baby.’

Tallulah throws her a stern look and Scarlett says, ‘God. Sorry. Yes. But I just can’t even … I mean, no one at college knows you’ve got a baby. I don’t get it, why wouldn’t you mention it?’

‘That’s not true actually. There are plenty of people at college who know I’ve got a baby, just not people you would ever think about talking to.’

Scarlett tuts and says, ‘Oh, right, yeah, make me out to be the villain here. It’s always me, isn’t it? Never anyone else. And who cares, anyway, the deal here is that you kept this, like, huge secret from me and I never kept anything from you. Not ever. I was always totally honest with you. Even on that last Sunday. I could have kicked Liam out and made sure your paths didn’t cross. But I didn’t. Because even though what I did was a bit suspect, I didn’t want to deceive you. I couldn’t lie to you. I’m incapable of lying, basically. That’s one of my biggest problems. So, wow, I mean, this …’ She gestures at the buggy. ‘I mean, just wow.’

Tallulah puts the brake on the buggy as they reach the edge of the pond and leans down to undo Noah’s straps, before lifting him out. ‘It’s not the same thing,’ she replies, tersely. ‘Not the same at all.’ She takes a slice of the stale bread from the bag and tears a bit off.

Noah grabs it from her hand and tries to throw it into the pond but it drops at Scarlett’s feet. Scarlett picks it up and hands it back to him and says, ‘Try again, buddy.’

She puts her hand over his and gently guides his arm into a proper throw and cheers when the bread hits the surface of the pond. ‘High five!’ she says, touching her hand against his as he stares at her in wonder.

‘You know I bloody love babies, Lula. I even told you that I love babies. I just don’t get any of this.’

Tallulah tears off another piece of bread and guides it into Noah’s hand. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I should have told you. You’re right. But I didn’t because I wanted you …’ She pauses to find words that won’t make her sound as bad as she feels. ‘I wanted you to think I was like you. You know. A free spirit.’

‘But you’ve got a bloody boyfriend! How less free can you possibly be than that?’

‘Yes, but a boyfriend isn’t permanent. A child is permanent. Wherever I go, he goes. Whatever I’m doing, I’m his mother. Twenty-four-seven. For the rest of my life. And it’s a lot, you know.’

‘Fuck, Lula. Life is a lot. All of it is a lot. You and me, we had this thing, this amazing, amazing thing that I thought was the most important thing that had ever happened to me. From minute one, that day on the bus, I saw you and I knew, I knew everything that was going to happen, that you and I were destined to be together. And then we were, and you made me so f—’ She glances at Noah and pauses. ‘You made me so happy. And I know, I know what I did with Liam was wrong, but I suppose I just thought that as long as you had Zach in your life, as long as you made a secret out of you and me’ – she gestures between them with her hand – ‘then we weren’t real.’

They both clap then, as Noah’s next attempt to throw bread lands successfully and a group of ducks draws quickly towards it. Scarlett puts out her hand and cups the back of Noah’s head. ‘God,’ she says. ‘He’s so precious. He’s so, so precious.’

Tallulah feels something in her gut, a kick of pleasure, but also of fear. She pulls Noah slightly closer into her body and Scarlett lets her hand drop from his head.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘we could do this. We could. I feel like you think I’m some kind of beautiful idiot, you know? And I know I do play up to that. I do. People are easier to deal with if they underestimate you. But I’m not an idiot, Lules. I’ve lived a life, things have happened, bad things. I’ve grown and learned and … and … matured. I could totally do the baby thing. With you. But the question is … are you ready to be honest about us?’

Tallulah glances at her questioningly. ‘You mean, tell people?’

Scarlett nods.

Tallulah turns her gaze back to the water, to the bowed heads of the ducks bobbing for the wet bread. She tries to picture herself telling various people in her life. Her mother would be fine. Ryan would be surprised but fine. Pretty much everyone she knows at college would be fine. There’s only one person she can’t ever imagine telling.

‘I can never tell Zach,’ she says. ‘He’d kill me.’

‘Kill you?’ Scarlett’s eyes are wide.

‘Yes. He’d kill me.’

‘Are you serious?’

Tallulah closes her eyes. She pictures his face, the way his jaw clenches together when he’s displeased about something, the way his fist comes down upon inanimate objects when he’s annoyed, the flare of his nostrils, the entitled tilt of his chin as he surveys the object of his displeasure. And she remembers the tightness of his hands around her arms when she told him that she didn’t have time for him and imagines that amplified tenfold if she told him that she was leaving him for a girl. Zach isn’t liberal. He has no time for political correctness. He is his mother’s son: small-minded, self-absorbed, inward-thinking, a little bit racist, a little bit homophobic, a little bit misogynistic. All those things that don’t matter when you’re fourteen and in love, but start to sprout insidiously to the surface over the years it takes you to go from child to adult, and even now it’s not blatant but she knows him well enough to know that it’s there. And she knows him well enough to know that he would be humiliated if he found out about her affair with Scarlett and that that humiliation would spill over into anger and that he is strong and he is already only one flash away from hurting her, constantly.

‘Yes,’ she replies, opening her eyes. ‘Yes. I think he would.’

‘Oh my God, Lula. Has he ever hit you?’

She shakes her head. ‘Not really.’

‘Not really?’

‘No. No, he hasn’t.’

Scarlett laces her fingers into her short hair and tugs at it, takes a couple of paces away and then paces back again. ‘Lula. God. I mean, this is bad. Do you even love him?’

‘I used to.’

‘But now?’

She shrugs and sniffs. ‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘Not any more. Not really.’

‘And do you want to spend the rest of your life with him?’

She shakes her head, hard. She can feel tears coming and she doesn’t want them. ‘No,’ she says, her voice cracking. ‘No. I don’t.’

‘Then fuck, Tallulah, you need to sort this out. You need to get rid of him. Because you can’t live your life like this. You can’t live your life being scared.’

‘But how do I get rid of him?’ Tallulah says. ‘How?’