The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
39
May 2017
Zach sits on the edge of the bed, watching Tallulah get ready to go to the pub.
‘This is fucking ridiculous,’ he says.
‘Can you stop watching me, please.’
‘I mean, for fuck’s sake. It’s not as if these people would even notice if you didn’t show up. They wouldn’t even care.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because people don’t care. Everyone goes around thinking they’re the centre of the fucking universe and that people miss them when they don’t come to things, but nobody gives a shit.’
‘So, if you didn’t turn up for football one Sunday, you think nobody would notice?’
‘That’s different. That’s a team. You need a certain number for a team. You don’t need a certain number to sit in the fucking pub.’
Tallulah doesn’t reply. She focuses instead on rearranging her earrings, exchanging the plain silver studs and hoops she normally wears for a fancy set of earrings that loop together on chains from the top of her ear down to the lobes. They’re similar to the sorts of earrings that Scarlett wears.
‘What the hell is that?’
She glances at Zach’s reflection in the mirror witheringly, but doesn’t respond. ‘Aren’t you going to give Noah his bath now?’ she says. ‘It’s getting late.’
‘I’m pretty sure that you don’t get to dictate our schedule since you’re not even going to be here.’
Tallulah rolls her eyes. ‘I can’t believe you’re making such a fuss about me leaving the house.’
‘It’s not you leaving the house that’s the issue. You leave the house all the fucking time. It’s you spending money. When we’re trying to save up.’
She turns and stares at him. ‘I told you,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to move out. I don’t want to buy a flat. I want to stay here.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m not particularly interested in what you want or don’t want. This isn’t about you. It’s about Noah.’
‘Noah doesn’t want to go and live in a box on the side of an A road either. He wants to stay here. It’s lovely here. The countryside on our doorstep. There’s the nursery just cross the common. His nana. His uncle. Your mum.’
There’s a beat of silence. He narrows his eyes at her. ‘You know my mum doesn’t even think Noah is mine.’
Tallulah freezes.
‘She reckons you’re just using me for money. And you know what, when I think about it, she’s got a point. I mean, all those months when you didn’t want me anywhere near you. All those months where you just kept me at arm’s length—’
‘You dumped me when I was pregnant,’ she interjects through bared teeth.
‘And why do you think that was?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You tell me.’
‘Because I didn’t believe you. Did I? I didn’t believe you were really pregnant, I thought you were just trying to trap me. Because we were so careful and I knew we’d been careful and I couldn’t see how it could have happened and then I started to think, all those times you said you were revising for your A levels, all those times you were too busy to see me. I just thought, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were off with someone else. And that that’s how you got pregnant. Because it can’t have been me.’
‘So you dumped me because you thought I was pregnant with somebody else’s baby?’
‘Yeah. Basically.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘But then I saw you out and about with the baby and you looked so happy and so beautiful and the baby was just, like, the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen and I thought—’ His voice starts to crack. ‘I thought, well, I wouldn’t be feeling that way if it wasn’t mine. I thought I’d know. I’d know if he was someone else’s. And every time I saw him I just fell more and more in love with him, and even though he doesn’t really look like me, I could just tell that he was mine. You know? Like, in here.’ He bangs his chest with his fist. ‘Mine. And I think my mum’s wrong. I mean, I know she’s wrong. Because he is. Isn’t he? Noah is mine?’
Zach’s eyes are filled with tears. He looks desperate and pathetic. For a moment Tallulah’s heart fills with a kind of pitiful love for him and she finds herself moving towards where he sits on the edge of the bed and putting her arms around his neck and whispering into his ear, ‘God, of course he’s yours, of course he is. He’s yours. I promise he’s yours.’
And his arms reach round her and pull her tighter towards him and she feels the wetness of his tears against her cheek and he says, ‘Please, Lules, please don’t go out tonight. Please stay home. I’ll go out and get us a bottle of wine. And some Doritos. Just you and me. Please.’
Tallulah thinks of Keziah and her weird little gang of local friends, all so alien to her with their barely begun lives and their safe little jobs, still waiting for boyfriends and babies as if that was all there was to life. She thinks of them all staring at her like an exhibit at a zoo, talking about motherhood and cohabitation as if it was an end goal, rather than a place you might find yourself by accident. She pictures them sitting primly on the velvet sofas at the Swan & Ducks, sipping cheap prosecco and laughing in high-pitched voices at things that aren’t particularly funny, and then she thinks of drinking wine with Zach, of capitalising on this rare moment of softness after all these weeks of hard edges and cutting comments, of pulling Zach back from the brink, persuading him that he could move back to his mum’s, that they could just co-parent, amicably, just as they’d done before he moved in. She thinks, if they can be nice to each other tonight maybe they can move on to a place where no one is angry and everyone gets what they want. And what they both want, more than anything, is Noah. And maybe Zach will learn to accept that this is enough, that he doesn’t need Tallulah too, that he doesn’t need a nuclear family, that there are other girls out there who will love him for what he is and not just put up with him for the sake of happy families, girls who would want a future with him, who would want to have sex with him more than once a week – girls who aren’t into girls.
So she nods her head against his face and says, ‘Yes. Let’s do that. It’ll be good. I’ll send Keziah a text now. We can stay in. We can stay in.’